by thepeopleplan | Aug 4, 2012 | culture, job fit, performance
I remember a Seinfeld episode where Jerry and Kramer pretended to be a traditional couple “How was your day, dear?”
Yes, they mocked this but how important are the People experiences to your day at work?
If you had a “bad day” it is often because of the people experiences you had—you had to assuage a difficult customer, a subordinate made a poor decision or behaved badly, a team member did not complete his part of the project and you had to do more work, your supervisor or co-worker was grumpy or critical, or you had to deal with petty politics.
Your day to day experiences with customers, managers and your team and the climate and culture of the office can be motivational or sapping to your energy.
Our firm’s founder Dr Jerry Newman found that social interaction was a key indicator in job satisfaction and retaining good workers in his book My Secret Life on the McJob. In fact, he found that many teenagers stayed at their fast food job even after college graduation partly based on the great camaraderie they felt at work.
A recent Gallup poll found that if someone had a “best friend at work” they reported more positive perceptions of their job, including much higher ratings of recognition, development, co-worker reliability, job importance, and achievement factors.
McDonald’s is leveraging the importance of what they call “Friends & Family” to attract employees.
According to a recent article by our firm’s founder Dr. Jerry Newman and McDonald’s Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer Richard Floersch, McDonald’s actually has very high employee perceptions of their people experiences in their job.
Reward/ Percent Who Love This About McDonald’s:
- Culture 82%
- Teamwork 80%
- People I work with 78%
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by thepeopleplan | Oct 27, 2011 | culture, job fit
The top person of an organization has a range of possible roles and background, such as a seasoned executive, a third generation business owner, a manager who started at “the bottom” and worked her way up, a new entrepreneur, or the managing partner in a partnership. (Titles might be CEO, President, Owner, Executive Director, Managing Partner, or General Manager)
I am often asked from business owners or top managers “what should I spend my time doing?”
Many have heard how they should work “on the business” not “in the business.”
This means that the top manager does not spend very much time (less than 20% is ideal) on direct or administrative work that should be delegated to staff.
Here is a list of typical functions and essential duties for the Top Manager of an organization.
[If you are not very knowledgeable in these areas or do not have strong competencies in strategic thinking, planning and project management, I urge you to hire these skills sets in your management team and / or find advisors who can provide the expertise and direction your organization will require to survive and thrive.]
Top Manager Duties
1. Set Direction
Provide strategic direction for organization, provide leadership and oversight of management team to implementation of short and long-term goals to achieve strategic objectives.
2. Administration
- Establish and implement departmental policies, goals, objectives, and procedures, conferring with managers, staff, board members
- Appoint department heads or managers and assign or delegate responsibilities to them
- Direct, plan, and implement policies, objectives, and activities of organization to ensure continuing operations, to maximize returns on investments, and increase productivity
3. Evaluate and Re-direct
- Analyze operations to evaluate organization performance and staff in meeting objectives, and to determine areas of potential cost reduction, program improvement, or policy change
- Confer with staff members, managers, consultants, board members to discuss issues, coordinate activities, and resolve problems
- Direct and coordinate an organization’s financial and budget activities to fund operations, maximize investments, and increase efficiency, prepare budgets for approval, including those for funding and implementation of programs
- Monitor industry and market conditions and trends, product innovations, and competitors’ products, prices, and sales
4. Oversee Departments and Functions
- Delivery and distribution of products/ services
- Sales and marketing
- Finance and accounting
- Human resources
- Information technology
Image courtesy of Nongkran_ch at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
by thepeopleplan | Aug 29, 2011 | job fit, performance
A 2010 survey by the Corporate Leadership Council of the Corporate Executive Board asked 880 high-potential employees if they were planning to leave their jobs in the next 12 months.
More than 25 percent said they had plans to leave! (This was 2.5 times more than a survey five years prior).
Many indicated current experiences are not providing development opportunities (64 percent). The survey assessed levels of “passion” and discretionary effort to measure engagement, which declined 30 percent in just one year from the 2009 survey.
What are you doing to provide mastery opportunities for your best employees? When the economy is in full swing (and perhaps before) these highly valuable and highly employable key people will have no problem finding another job that better meets their professional and personal needs.
Read full article:
The Care and Feeding of High-Potential Employees
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by thepeopleplan | Apr 7, 2011 | job fit, performance
Do we have job descriptions? Sure we have some we wrote 5 years ago in a file somewhere….
I agree, job descriptions are not the most exciting part of human resources. Although job descriptions are not legally required, they can become the foundation of your employee selection and performance management process.
If you are looking to hire a new employee, the recruiting advertisement is most effective when it describes the position and the competencies you require for an Ideal Candidate. To be most efficient, you want a few fully qualified candidates to apply, not hundreds of unqualified ones to sort through. To do this, you want to describe your job in words that make an Ideal Candidate say “Wow- I can’t wait to get this job!” (and the unqualified ones to say, “oh, I am not what they are looking for” and then do not apply). Want sales people who can close 50% of their proposals? —put it in the ad—those sales people with confidence in their closing ability will apply, and “C Players” will keep looking.
For current employees, an enhanced job description can provide the clear expectations for what is required to be considered a good performer in this position. This is where competencies and performance metrics should be added to the job description to create a full Job Competency Profile. For example, an interior designer needs to “coordinate with sales team to provide up to two space design options within 5 days of initial client meeting” and “provide 100% accurate final product layout to purchasing within 3 days of client approval”.
If you do not have performance metrics written down, these are often informally understood (or employees have their own standards). Formalizing these can greatly improve team work—for example, the interior designer might consider her work is “fast” when she gives a draft to sales in 7 days. Sales “expects” that she “should” do this is 2 days.
You get the picture! Instead of letting everyone make up their own performance rules and guess as to if they are “Doing the Right Things”—spend some time developing clear performance expectations and then sharing them with each person.
Image courtesy of Just2shutter at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
