Summer's Top 150: Last Installment

It's the last day of summer already, and there you have it: the 150+ blog posts, articles, presentations, podcasts and videos I've come across over the last 3 months. Here's the final installment:

1. If there's a single link from this Summer's Top 150 you need to check out, this is the one: a great slide show on company culture, and very relevant to the public service.
2. Forget excellence - Be outstanding!
3. Realigning Your Role
4. Owning Your Career
5. Behavior never lies
6. Execute or die
7. Maybe (New Michael Jordan Commercial) - I just like the implication for employees :-)
8. The New Employee Retention Crisis: Retaining Low Performers
9. What are you thinking about
10. Employee Engagement: You Are Not the Boss of Me.
11. Multitasking, marijuana, managing?
12. When weak management pushes top performers out the door
13. Behaving badly
14. Facebook Friending Policy
15. 5 Ways HR Can Poise a Firm for Growth?
16. It takes two baby!

Summer's Top 150: Employee Engagement

Third installment of the summer's Top 150:

1. I'm On A Mission to Ban Motivation Programs - Join the Movement
2. Happiness at work at Zappos
3. Engaging for Success: The MacLeod Review
4. High Commitment, High Performance Management
5. Labor Daze
6. Workplace Relations – Building Trust at Workplace
7. How Employee Engagement Turned Around Campbell's
8. Four Simple Ways to Make Your Employees Happier
9. The Secret Responsibilities of a Leader
10. 22 Ways Employees Benefit From Their Own Engagement
11. Who is Responsible for Employee Engagement?

A Not-So-Inconvenient Renewal: What Happens When Managers Change the Way They Manage

If you have been following my work over the last couple of years, you may be wondering if I actually practice what I preach with regards to organization renewal, change management, and most importantly, people management.

Every three years, the federal public service of Canada administers a government-wide survey called the Public Service Employee Survey (PSES). The 2005 PSES was administered just a week before I joined my current organization. The last PSES was administered in November and December 2008, and the results were released a few weeks ago. I have done the analysis, and the results speak for themselves: renewal is possible, and yes, people management does make a difference!

I have just put together a document entitled "A Not-So-Inconvenient Renewal: What Happens When Managers Change the Way They Manage". It presents the dramatic progress made by my organization between 2005 and 2008, as measured by the PSES.

The document is an epilogue to “An Inconvenient Renewal: Are Public Service Managers Ready to Change the Way They Manage?”, a paper I released in 2007 in which I stressed the importance of good people management and argued that while top-down change has its merits, many of the things that would make the most significant and palpable difference don’t happen at the top of the organization, but rather at the field level in the everyday interactions between managers and their employees.

I hope the PSES results will convince you that when managers change the way they manage, the ripple effects can be felt throughout the organization. To learn more about the renewal efforts in my organization, you may browse through some of the links featured in the side-bar of my blog under the header "My Websites, Papers, and Other Initiatives".

Enjoy you reading, and please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any question.

Employee Engagement

I briefly mentioned the concept of "employee engagement" in my last post, so here's a selection of my 20 favourite blog posts on the topic (in no particular order):

1. U.S. Employee Engagement Deteriorates as Financial Crisis Worsens
2. Kudos to Blessing White’s State of Engagement 2008 Report
3. How employee engagement affects your organisation
4. Morale and mood
5. 6 Mini Employee Engagement Rants…1,2,3,4,5,6
6. Employee Engagement: What do we need to remove?
7. Systematically Poisoning Employee Engagement
8. Why Engagement Sits at about 20 Percent
9. From Disengagement to Employee Engagement in 10 Seconds
10. The 4 top productivity drivers
11. 5 Steps to Leading Change
12. The five rules of engagement
13. Engage 5
14. Employees Who Quit, But Stay On
15. Get rid of managers and we'll all be happier
16. Five Signs Your Management is Destroying Employee Morale
17. Three reasons why managers don't do people management
18. Top management dis's the importance of managerial and supervisory skills
19. An Asset, not a liability
20. When It Comes To People, We Need To Start Measuring What Matters

You will also find a few more here: 10 Best Articles on Employee Engagement.

If the topic interests you, I also recommend Manager Tools for Employee Engagement. Some disarmingly simple stuff here, i.e.:

"What will the main work of a manager be for 2009?
If I were to suggest a starting point for One Small Thing, I'd recommend that Managers begin to develop habits such as:
1. Saying "good morning" to each member of the team
2. Asking each team member "how's it going?" at least once a week
3. Asking each team member "what do you think?" whenever a problem surfaces"

Finally, as a follow-up to my post on innovation and creativity, here's a a short video that will look all too familiar to some of you (thanks tom Peter Smith at Spagetthi Testing for bringing this to my attention!).

Random Thoughts on Talent Management

Take the quiz:

1. What do we mean by “talent management”?

• a) The programs, policies and processes in place to support recruitment, retention, training and development, staffing, succession planning, etc.
• b) The actual day-to-day management of talented people

2. What do we mean by “talented people”?

• a) The so-called “best and brightest”
• b) Anyone with interests and talents that can be put to contribution

3. If you answered a) to the previous question:

• How do you know who “best and brightest” are?
• How do you know you are not overlooking anyone who is actually talented?

4. Talent management should be done in the interest of who?

• a) The organization
• b) The employee
• c) Both

***

My working definition of talent management goes something like this: “Getting the best from employees so that employees feel they are contributing their best.”

While the first half of the definition is straightforward enough, I feel the public service tends to fall short on the second half. Indeed, according to the 2005 Public Service Employee Survey, 96% of federal public servants are “Strongly committed to making difference in organization” (Question # 86). However, the overall employee engagement score for the public service is only 56,8% - a 40% gap!

(The methodology to determine your employee engagement score is explained here, but in short you just need to calculate the average of the percentage of employees who “agree” or “strongly agree” with the statements contained in the following ten questions of the 2005 PSES:
Q. 16 Encouraged to be innovative or take initiative in job
Q. 18 Have a say in decisions/action affecting work
Q. 27 Supervisor takes suggestions for improvement seriously
Q. 37 Satisfied with how informal complaints are resolved in work unit
Q. 44 Immediate supervisor does good job at helping develop career
Q. 46 Have opportunities for promotion within dept or agency, given qualifications
Q. 63 Department or agency works hard to create a workplace that prevents harassment and discrimination
Q. 65 In work unit process of selecting person for position is fair
Q. 78 Sr. management does good job at sharing information
Q. 87 Overall, organization treats with respect)

I sometimes wonder if senior executives and managers are aware of this gap. A group 300 senior executives from a federal department were recently polled at a meeting: “Which leadership competency is strongest in the Department: 1) Values and Ethics, 2) Strategic Thinking, 3) Engagement of People, 4) Management Excellence”. 46% of the respondents answered “Engagement of People”. Yet, this department is in the bottom 20% in terms of employee engagement according to the Hill Times’ ranking of federal public service organizations...

***

I see a number of obstacles preventing the public service from doing better with regards to talent management.

At the organizational level:

1. Predominance of program and policies over good people management.
2. People management is often an afterthought, and takes a backseat to all other priorities.
3. Doing what is easily measurable rather than what is important.

At the field level:

• Generally speaking, from the outset, we don’t hire people for their talent.
• Good performance and poor performance are practically treated the same.
• You can’t talk about talent management and expect to be taken seriously if you put bad supervisors in front of employees.

With the current economic context, I know many managers are thinking: “See, working for the public service isn’t so bad all of sudden, because we have a certain level of job security that the private sector doesn’t necessarily enjoy.” That might be true. It is also true that many public servants will content themselves with their current jobs, not making as much noise about poor people management practices as they would in less turbulent times.

But I have to ask managers and senior executives:

What type of organization do you want to be?

• The one people cling to and feel lucky to be in when the economy is bad? Or,
  
• The one people want to join when the competition for talent is at its peak?

***

Back to talent management and the Public Service Employee Survey (PSES).

The 2008 PSES presents a number of changes over the 2005 PSES. I counted 21 questions that were removed, and the addition of 16 new ones. Of those 16 questions, there are five to which I will pay extra attention when analyzing the results for my organization, as they have clear implications for talent management:

• Q. 10 I know how my work contributes to the achievement of my department’s or agency’s goals
• Q. 16 My job is a good fit with my skills
• Q. 4. My job is a good fit with my interests
• Q. 8 I get a sense of satisfaction from my work
• Q. 9 Overall, I like my job

So what’s the connection with talent management?

My organization has made performance management a top priority given the number of new supervisors who were appointed over the past three years. One of the things we did was giving each supervisor a copy of the book “The Managerial Moment of Truth”. I love this book as it offers a very simple methodology to provide accurate feedback to employees. One of the most interesting chapters of the book however, is the one on “managing the mismatch” (Chapter 10). The authors argue that four elements need to be present in order to get the best performance from an employee:

1. Alignment (with mission, values, strategy of the organization)
2. Skill (to do the job)
3. Interest (in the work)
4. Attitude (whether disruptive or not)

I see a clear linkage between these elements and the 2008 PSES questions I listed above:

• Alignment = Q. 10 I know how my work contributes to the achievement of my department’s or agency’s goals
• Skill = Q. 16 My job is a good fit with my skills
• Interest = Q. 4. My job is a good fit with my interests
• Attitude = Q. 8 I get a sense of satisfaction from my work
• Overall job match = Q. 9 Overall, I like my job
  

Now I agree, the correlation is imperfect and the data incomplete (for instance you may argue that Q 8 and 9 should be inverted, or that the attitude of an employee might be the result of some past history with his organization). But that is not the point. What is more important for the manager is to get a sense of what needs to be addressed (or leveraged) as far as talent management goes. For example:

• You would normally expect “alignment” (Q. 10) to be high, but if it’s not, this is something you can easily fix as a manager through improved communications with staff.
• If you think of talent management as the day-to-day management of talented people, you should do well on “skill” (Q. 16), but if that’s not the case, it’s never too late to take the time to sit down your employees and identify with their strengths are and how they can put them to better contribution.
• Same thing goes for “interest” (Q. 4).
• “Attitude” (Q. 8) and overall job match (Q. 9), are partly out of the control of managers, but they are also a consequence of the three factors above.

In all case, there are implications for talent management and you as a manager can have a significant influence on it.

Your thoughts?