Employe Plaza Board

In team-based organizations, opportunities for promotion come rarely. So how do you provide opportunities for team members to grow and develop? Follow these suggestions:

>> Enrich the job. Increase the variety of team members’ tasks, and give them more control over their work. Suggestion: Look both horizontally – team members can learn to operate more pieces of equipment – and vertically – they can take on more “management” tasks, such as planning.

>> Encourage lateral transfers. Let them build knowledge by jumping organizational boundaries. Caution: Productivity may dip while team members learn new jobs. However, the payback in motivation and big-picture understanding usually offsets such costs.

>> Develop career “webs.” When team members have no career ladder to climb, build a web – a series of pathways that radiate from your team to other teams and departments. In fields where competency comes from years of experience and education, establish ties to other teams, inside and outside your organization. Create reciprocal relationships – you train their people in certain areas, and they train your people. This allows team members to progress in their fields of expertise – instead of having to move into management if they want to earn bigger salaries. Suggestion: Identify levels of knowledge and contribution in each technical area. Then identify appropriate training and experiences that can lead a worker from one level of participation to another. Increase pay as the team member moves across the web.

>> Design new roles. With a little creativity and flexibility, organizations can let team members design new roles. Share your organization’s challenges with team members and ask what they have to contribute. What can they do to add value? You may be surprised at the wealth of ideas that employees pigeonholed in limiting jobs can come up with. Example: At Johnsonville Foods, an accounting clerk suggested a new product line. He ended up running the new division.

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I recently read an article in my favorite business magazine on the value of employee exit interviews. It went into great detail on the benefits of gathering data from departing employees. It talked about maintaining confidentiality, asking open-ended high impact questions, proper timing of the actual interviews, etc.

I agreed with its content and recommendations but view it as only addressing the back end or “lagging portion” of the employee management process.

When I say “lagging” I mean gathering information and data on things that have already happened. For example, information on financial statements are lagging indicators. They provide information on activity in the past. Although valuable moving forward, it’s too late to make changes or adjustments in the period it is reporting on.

In the case of the exit interview, the information is lagging related to these employees since they have already decided to leave the company. In most cases, the exit interview is way too late in the process to save a valuable employee. The majority of businesses today manage based on lagging indicators.

Best in class companies, however, excel in using leading indicators to drive performance. A better leading question is, “Could we have identified the employee’s issues earlier in the process and kept them?”

Leading indicators are measures/metrics that warn you in advance of potential issues. A good real life example of a leading indicator would be the “low fuel” light that appears in your car when you are low on gas. This light triggers you to take action prior to running out of gas. An exit interview in this scenario would involve asking questions after you ran out of gas. Although it is valuable information, it was not helpful in preventing if from occurring in the first place.

An effective management review process includes a good mix of leading and lagging indicators. Creating leading indicators for the employee management process involves effectively evaluating employee satisfaction. There are many wonderful books on measuring employee satisfaction so we won’t discuss this in this article (see recommended books section).

The point I want to make is that improving employee satisfaction (leading) will drive improvement in employee turnover (lagging) rates. If you manage the leading indicators effectively, the lagging indicators will take care of themselves.

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