What's being done right now to make sure that the workforce they have today will be able to meet the needs of the future, or will we be hearing about this labor market mismatch in the future, too? Are businesses really just hoping that the right graduates come out of college with the necessary skills, or that mid-career pros will be able to utilize existing skills in entirely new ways, or are they providing guidance and resources so that the labor pool stays stocked with talent?
Culture-transforming practices don't necessarily make business successful. It's still a matter of sound decision making at the top that makes a company profitable, or not. The benefits of progressive, empowering, engaging cultures is that they are more able to take advantage of good decisions or favorable changes in the environment and, generally, lessen the impact when things take a turn for the worse.
From time to time I am contacted by recruiters, usually third-party folks who are looking to gain a commission, and once in a while I get a message from an in-house recruiter who has found my resume on monster.com or LinkedIn. The typical introduction, whether by phone or email, tends to go something like: Hello, I am ___________, a senior recruiter with ___________. I have a position I think you are a perfect fit for. Please forward me your resume and I’ll give you more details about the position. Now, all of that sounds normal, right? It’s...
As I continue to contemplate the machinations of the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), I've had a few conversations recently with people who are trying to understand how ROWE works. While I am far fom an expert, I have come up with a few things in order to share my understanding.
When getting a jump on things isn't accompanied by also finishing ahead of time, you tend to get the exact opposite of what you'd hoped for. The problem gets exacerbated when, by directing work to begin in advance of the arrival of necessary inputs, the team gets too far ahead. Managers who are pressured to keep their people busy will create tasking of suspicious value for the appearance of looking productive. Why not let the staff determine how to spend that time, whether at work or away, as long as all obligations are met?
Several times, I have heard people say that we need to get rid of the paternalistic, parenting relationships at work and gravitate more towards relationships based on patience, trust and mentoring. Every time I hear that sentiment, I get a shiver up my Dad spine, because it tends to reflect a lot of things about parenting that are, however unfortunate, full of grains of truth. Dads are expected to be authoritative. Their decisions are non-negotiable. They never show pain or fear. They have answers even when they don’t. Oh, and the last thing you ever want to do is piss...
In recent years, we've seen some thought leaders offer up best selling books, visionary programs and torrents of articles and other works describing what is wrong, how to fix it, and attempting to explain the science behind their approaches. In particular, Dan Pink gave us Drive, Best Buy gave us the ROWE experiment, and Lean thinkers continue to encourage us to think of front-line emplyees first, as in Jim Womack's Gemba Walk. What I find interesting is that all of these approaches to improving the workplace, at least in part, have some basis in Peter Scholtes 1998 Book, The...
Dissent is, afterall, the outward sign of dissatisfaction combined with the will to say something about it. In no way should we convince ourselves that silence implies consent. Instead, we should first think that silence implies the lack of desire to say what's on your mind for fear of retribution. So, we return to Deming's philosophy, which told us to eliminate fear. A lack of dissenting opinion is the manifestation of fear. An explosion of tight agreement is, too.
On the heels of last week's post "$50,000 and time served" there's the troublesome case of Zynga, which promised early employees in the infancy of the startup's rise stock options, but is now asking those same employees to return the options in a compensation renegotiation. Several analysts (see CNN Money/Fortune and Washington Post articles) have described this an effort to align performance with compensation for those employees, however, the rest of, well, pretty much everybody sees this as renegging on a promise which, whether we're talking stock options or bubble gum, is never looked upon with much favor.
Mark Zuckerberg was in Boston on Monday, looking to recruit MIT and Harvard students for gainful employment with Facebook. Zuck's appearance prompted commentator Jon Keller to consider the Facebook founder "foolish" and "callow." What Generation Y and the millenials seem to "get" intuitively, and what anyone from the upper reaches of Gen X and beyond seem to struggle with, is that work is not just supposed to be something that allows you to do fulfilling, enjoyable things with your life. Rather, work can and should be something that provides that enjoyment all the time, and that living is...
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