Can Managers and Their Staff be More Productive?

Tough times invariably cause businesses to review how productive and efficient their staff and processes are. But since the mid eighties, many businesses have had rounds of process improvement programmes and efficiency drives, so can the orange really be squeezed to get more out, or is there simply no juice left?

A report launched this week by the Management Consultancies Association (MCA) suggests that there’s still plenty of juice left in UK businesses. It claims that UK productivity could increase by up to a fifth if businesses change their approach to planning and measuring performance.

The MCA report, entitled ‘Getting more from the same – Delivering sustainable productivity improvement’, was sponsored by consultants Trinity House and surveyed top leaders across a range of public and private and organisations. The research identified that the key to productivity improvement was to engage and motivate employees, and that there were six critical success factors in achieving this.

Get sponsorship at a senior level
Leaders need to ensure that the business case for change and the performance objectives are clear and understood. This provides employees with the essential ‘why we are doing this’.

Involve the front line managers
The people with the most knowledge and understanding about the business are invariably the front and second line managers and therefore need to be consulted on all aspects of the change and performance improvement.

Measure the right things
Rather than having a plethora of performance measures it is more effective to choose a small number of relevant performance measures.

Communicate the business case and metrics –
It is vital that all employees understand the reasons for the change and that business measures are translated into meaningful objectives for each part of the business, team and individual. Managers and staff should be made accountable and rewarded for their contribution to productivity improvement.

Give managers the tools and skills they need for performance mangement.
Help the front line managers to be active managers, coaching and floor-walking rather than answering emails, doing admin and fire-fighting. Support them with appropriate management training and development.

Give it time and make it part of business as usual
Don’t expect instant results and manage expectations so employees don’t become de-motivated or disheartened. Performance improvement should be incorporated into job descriptions, business processes and reward mechanisms. Performance management should be viewed as part of day to day business and not as a one off initiative.

These findings add real weight to what many management consultants intuitively know about performance improvement. To read more about the MCA report go to http://www.mca.org.uk/mca/

Successful Marketing – How management training can help

All businesses need to allocate a good deal of resources to market their products and services if they are to be successful. It will not be self evident to the average purchaser that you provide the best management training, IT equipment or conservatories! Potential customers need to be told.

However, successful marketing is not simply about buying a few branded pens and paperweights and investing in an advertising campaign. It is about getting the fundamentals right in the first place.

The first “fundamental” activity is to deliver a quality product, service or experience in the first place. Investing in management training can help to ensure that all staff are motivated, capable and committed to this goal. Happy customers will naturally recommend your products or services to others without any prompting from you. Conversely, if staff are not committed to delivering a quality experience, no amount of promotions or advertising will change this.

Secondly, be clear about what is unique about your product or service that will enable your business to stand out from the crowd. For example, if you offer management training and development services what will set your business apart from the plethora of other training providers? Is it your approach, intellectual property or combined experiences?

Thirdly, proactively work with your existing customers. This may be in the form of promoting a wider range of products/services to them or alternatively using them as a route to winning new customers. For example, retailers use reward schemes that encourage and reward their customers for spending more money with them. Other examples include health or golf clubs who reward their members for recruiting their friends, family and work colleagues.

Finally, utilise your staff. Employees who are motivated, committed and happy will talk to their family and friends about what a fantastic place their work is and how their products/services are better than anyone else’s. It is therefore vital that managers are trained appropriately to get the most out of their staff.

Successful marketing is not just about advertising and promotion, it is also about getting the “fundamentals” right and appropriate investment in management training will help the business to get these in place. Once complete, the business is then in a position to invest in the more “traditional” aspects of marketing.

Planning for Empowerment

In a previous article we considered the rationale and benefits of empowering staff. However, it’s important to recognise that successful empowerment, requires careful preparation and planning, it not simply a case of giving someone a series of tasks and letting them get on with it. So what do we need to consider?

Use the following guidelines to help you plan your approach to empowerment.

Challenge yourself. The biggest barrier to successful empowerment is your own personal assumptions. For example, many managers do not empower their staff because they wrongly believe that they are not capable of taking on the responsibility, or because they personally will do a better job. In the short term these assumptions may be correct, what if you provided appropriate team training and support and enabled them to gain the skills and experience they need?

Be clear about what you expect. Remember, you are empowering your staff to deliver results not tasks. Therefore it is important to be clear what the desired results will be. In other words, what you will expect from them in terms of quality and quantity, budget, timing etc. Recognise that you will hold them accountable for the results and let the individual determine most appropriate means of how to achieve this.

Identify the guidelines that need to be set. People work best when they understand the boundaries that they have. Therefore what policies, principles, and procedures are considered essential to get the desired results? What do you expect them not to do? Also what levels of authority are you willing you empower the individual with?

Ensure that resources will be available. Clearly giving responsibility to your staff for specific outcomes without giving them the resources to achieve them is setting them up to fail. Therefore what financial, human, technical resources are available to them to deliver? What skills do they need? What other support is available to them?

Hold staff accountable for results. If you empower your staff, how will you hold them accountable? For example, what are the standards of acceptable performance? How will results/performance be measured and evaluated? How will progress reports be made and accountability sessions held?

Consider consequences. If you are going to hold people accountable, you must also consider what will happen when the desired results are achieved or not achieved. For example, positive consequences could include financial, recognition, appreciation, advancement, new assignments, enlarged responsibilities, and possibly promotion. Negative consequences could range from reprimand to retraining or termination of employment.

Empowerment is all about gain. It is about the gain of your time and improving your impact. It is also about gaining access to the skills, knowledge and initiative of your staff. However, it’s important to recognise that successful empowerment, requires careful preparation and planning, it not simply a case of giving someone a series of tasks and letting them get on with it. Doing this will only end in failure and disappointment.

Empower your staff and reap the rewards!

So what is empowerment about and what are the benefits? Empowerment is quite simply a highly practical and productive way of getting the best form yourself and your staff. It involves not simply the delegation of tasks but decision making and full responsibility to.
Empowerment is one of the high leverage activities that a manager should engage in. Using Pareto’s 80:20 rule, empowerment is one of the 20% tasks that gives you 80% of the results you seek.
Why is this? Quite simply it is because it encourages staff to use their initiative. For example, there are a number of levels of initiative that a manager can encourage their staff to demonstrate. From the lowest to the highest they are:

1) Wait until told.
2) Ask what to do.
3) Recommend and then take action
4) Act, and advise immediately.
5) Act and advise routinely.

If a manager behaves in a ‘do what you are told’ way towards their staff, they simply encourage their staff to come to them with all their issues. A manager who engages in this type of behaviour will have little time to work on their important tasks as they will spend most of their time resolving staff related issues.
However a manager who encourages their staff to demonstrate high levels of initiative (ie levels 4 and 5 above), is effectively saying to their staff, ‘I trust you, you are responsible go and sort it!’. This therefore leaves the management more time to concentrate on their important, high impact tasks
However, empowerment often worries managers because they are afraid of losing control. Losing control of their staff, of budgets, customer service, ideas or standards. The idea of empowerment worries them because it seems to entail the loss of all that carefully planned control. However, empowerment is not about losing control – it is about giving it away.
There’s a big difference between losing control and giving it up. Giving up control, in other words empowerment, requires careful preparation and planning, it is not simply a case of giving someone a series of tasks and letting them get on with it. We will consider preparing for empowerment in the next article.
So, empowerment is not about loss of control In fact it’s about gain, gain of time, impact, commitment, and ideas. Most of all it is about gaining access to the skills, knowledge and initiative of your staff. Why wouldn’t you want to empower them?

What should happen next after the Development Centre feedback process is complete?

By the end of the feedback process to the participants in a Development Centre you should have both individual data specific to each person and also group data relating to the cohorts of managers who have gone through the process.

This data will cover the strengths, weaknesses and potential development areas & solutions for each individual as well as for the larger group. It will have been further informed by the input of the line managers when they have been involved in the feedback discussions with their participants and any development needs related to the needs of the current and future jobs.

The Organisation clearly has a responsibility to make productive use of this data for the direct benefit of the participants especially and also for the Organisation as a whole.
In addition you may also have some additional data about the future potential of the participants and their suitability or unsuitability for other roles in the future.

This data can further inform career development and succession plans for this group of managers.
Hopefully each participant would leave the development centre with a greater sense of their strengths and a personal development plan that they can follow. The Organisation should support this by providing resource, funding and access to any suitable training courses, development events, projects or individual coaching and mentoring initiatives to help the participants to grow and develop their competencies and performance.

What is the best way of giving Development Centre participants their feedback?

There a number of factors to considered when making this decision.
The timing of the feedback is important – it should be given as close to the Development Centre event itself, so as to be fresh & relevant in the eyes of the participant and also to be fresh and clear for the observer who has been allocated this role.

It is also important not to let a participant “stew” for a long time and to become stressed, fearing the worst, whilst waiting for the feedback.
I am presuming here that the person giving the feedback would always be one of the observers present at this subject’s specific Centre. This is important for the participant to allow them to ask questions of the observer and of course to be given credible answers and feedback from a person who directly observed their performance and who made any judgements about their effectiveness and competency.

It also needs to involve the participant’s line manager in order for the feedback to be considered in conjunction with the employee's day to day work and in the context of the ongoing and future personal development planning for each individual. This is crucial given the line manager’s overall responsibility for the personal performance and team development of their employees. This can be done but does not need to take place at the same time as the initial individual Centre feedback outlined above. However it should be done within 2 – 4 weeks of the Development Centre event or it can lose its impact and relevance.

My ideal model is to give the participant’s more or less immediate feedback about how they have done, their strengths, development areas and any potential solutions on the last afternoon of a two day Development Centre process and then to follow this feedback report up with both them and their managers within two weeks of the event.

Being a Leader in tough times

Over the next few months, many organisations may face difficult times, but as a leader within your organisation what can you do to ensure your firm remains successful? The following are a number of tips that will help.

1. Don’t be fearful. To often individuals and organisations become paralysed by merchants of “gloom and doom”. However, the reality is that life still goes on; people and businesses still have needs. So its time to focus on your organisations uniqueness and adapt your offering to outsmart your competitors.

2. Focus on cash flow. The liquidity crisis has highlighted the importance of cash – if you have it you won’t go bust, so as a leader it’s vital that you are really on top of your cash position.

3. Avoid simply slashing costs. While it is prudent to review costs during difficult times, indiscriminate cutting of costs across the business are more likely to damage customer relationships and ultimately damage the business in the long term.

4. Don’t become internally focussed. As a leader it is easy to become distracted by internal issues such as restructuring, reorganisations and cost reductions. However, it is vital that you also give time to your key customers, their needs and generating as much revenue as possible.

5. Remember – you need people! Try to avoid making redundant people that are vital to the future success of your organisation. In addition, simply putting a freeze on all recruitment can lead to a shortage of good people in the future.

6. Keep people motivated. While employees are less likely to leave their jobs during difficult times, it doesn’t mean that they will be any more motivated. Identify ways that your staff can be more empowered, take greater responsibility and use their initiative more.

7. Support your customers. Understand what difficulties your customers may have. How can you help them? For example, what innovative pricing or payment terms can you agree on? Support will breed customer loyalty for the future.

Finally, it is also important to recognise that not all areas of the economy will be hit in the same way. Clearly anything related to domestic property and banking have been hit hard, but there will be other areas in both private and public sectors that will not be affected in the same way.