Organizational Hiring / Policy and Procedure Overkill! (2 in a series on hiring)

NEW PROBLEM NEW RULE

Picture this.  A small local business has a total of 25 employees.  One of those employees is consistently late to work.  The boss has mentioned it a few times, but nothing changes.  One morning the employee comes in late on a particularly bad day for the boss.  The boss has had enough.  She orders a time clock for the office, and writes a new policy that everyone must clock in and out.  A few weeks later the boss notices a customer standing around waiting for help.  Another employee, who should be assisting the customer, is distracted because she’s on her Facebook account.  The irritated boss writes another new policy.  Employees are no longer allowed to go on any social networking sites while at work. 

This scenario points out a very common habit; rather than deal with an employee problem, the boss writes a new policy and expects the problem to be resolved.  With each new policy, your star employees are further punished and left wondering why the policy is needed.  Over time, this habit leads to restrictive environments and rule books that are too large to memorize.

Organizational values can help.  If you hire, fire, train, reward and communicate towards defined strategic values, restrictive and detailed rules are no longer needed.  The “right way” is known without the rule book.  Here’s an example.  Let’s say that ambition is one of your core business values.  One of the ways you’ve defined this to employees is by stating that everyone is expected to practice exceptional time management skills.  You explain the “why” behind this.  It’s discussed in interviews and new employee orientations.  It’s listed on job descriptions.  Employees are rewarded for exceptional time management practices, and training to improve this skill set is provided.  When an employee consistently comes to work late, you don’t need a new restrictive rule or a time clock.  They are not meeting the expectation, made very clear, of exceptional time management.   They are not adhering to the core value of ambition.  Now deal with it.  Similarly, when an employee’s time on Facebook leaves a customer standing around with no help, that’s not practicing exceptional time management either.  You don’t need a new rule; you just need to deal with the problem.  An added benefit is that employees are more willing to accept expectations that are tied to values, than they are to accept a constantly growing rule book brought on by unresolved problems.

Organizational Values (2 in a series on values)

  

What exactly are values?  Values are the core set of principles that drive your decisions and behavior.  They are "valuable" in the sense that they are an important compass for us as we cycle through life.  A well understood value system becomes most valuable in ambiguous circumstances--times when you cannot find the answer in a book, the Internet or the law.  I'm talking about situations that compel you to make a judgment call in unfamiliar territory.  When you are experiencing something for the first time, you don’t have past experience to rely on in making a decision.  Values are the guide.  These same issues exist within organizations as well.  Having a deliberate and clear set of organizational values is essential for success in the world we operate in today.

As a manager you have two choices.  You can attempt to write a policy and procedure manual that covers what to do in every possible situation, or you can integrate values into your people practices and rely on employees to make “good” choices based on those values.  The first alternative is all too often tried, but always fails.  Employees can’t memorize volumes of policy and procedure and often end up feeling as if they can’t move without checking the policy manual first.  They can however learn expected behaviors as they relate to clear organizational values.  The most successful organizations have followed this path leading to a values based and well-known organizational culture.

                                                                                              By Jeff Sullivan

Organizational Values (1 in a series on values)

Values Determine Behavior

Do you ever step back, look at your life, the decisions you've made and the things that you have done and wonder why?  Why do you consistently follow a pattern when reacting to the world around you?  If you did step back, you would likely see certain patterns. Fear of certain things, the tendency to gravitate to similar types of people, or always avoiding certain situations, are examples of behavior patterns.  Mostly likely, you are using your own set of personal values to guide your behavior.  Your values are formed by the environment you grew up within--parents, teachers, significant events etc.  These events and experiences lead to certain beliefs which then serve to form your values. 

Organizations behave similarly. Whether an organization has declared values or not, values WILL determine behavior in all organizations.  Successful organizations have a set of strategic values integrated into all people practices.  This forms the foundation for the business ecosystem.  Values impact how employees behave and respond to customers, what goals are set and reached, what policies and procedures are followed, how managers treat employees, and how employees treat each other.  Just watch behavior.  You can also determine an organization’s values by finding out where time and money are spent.  Organizational leaders have a choice: allow any old values to naturally grow, or create, communicate and integrate strategic values that purposefully move the organization forward.  What values are controlling behavior in YOUR organization?

SURROUND YOURSELF WITH SMART PEOPLE

"We don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything." - Thomas Edison

“Surround yourself with smart people” is advice you will hear many times over in the business world. It does not necessarily mean to find people with higher IQs than your own. It is much broader than that. Emotional intelligence also plays a huge factor. In addition, the advice refers to surrounding yourself with people who have different talents, skills, experiences and abilities from your own. Why? One of the most important lessons you will learn as a business owner, or manager of any team, is that you don’t know everything! That’s a hard pill for some to swallow. It doesn’t matter if you have the highest IQ of anyone in the country, you still will not have had all the experiences nor have all of the talents and skills to make the best decisions about every topic every time.

I can offer so many examples of this in my own business that it is hard to even know where to start. Let me just briefly describe three examples that have occurred just in the past week:

I was signing up to attend a training course to become certified in a certain personality/behavior profiling instrument. The certification training would have cost $2,500. I had researched many other profiling instruments and felt that I had made a good choice. However, before scheduling my travel arrangements I sent a quick email to a friend who is certified in many of these types of personality and behavior profiles. I asked his opinion about the certification I was about to attend. He sent back a message that completely changed my plans. His experiences with both marketing and delivering this particular profile far surpassed my own knowledge. Had I not sought his advice, I would have wasted $2,500.

I am developing the outline and content for a team building presentation. I brought my plan to my business partner who handles all the design for our presentations. Despite the fact that she handles design and I handle content, we always bounce ideas off one another. In this particular example, she made several comments about the flow of the presentation that improved it many times over. Together we produce a better presentation than one of us alone could do.

Last year we made a big investment on computer equipment, software, and software training. This week, after a two hour demonstration at the Apple store, we realized we made some bad choices in the equipment and training that we chose. In total this was about a $10,000 mistake, not including the time we could have saved by having the right equipment and software that would have significantly increased our productivity over the last year. If we had brought in the expertise last year that we sought this past week, we could have avoided this mistake.

REACH OUT! Talk to people, listen to people, and learn from other’s experiences and talents. The smartest people are “smart” because they take full advantage of the talents, knowledge and experiences that surround them