The Human Factor in Today's Workplace

Today there is much talk about profits being the focus--the "bottom line"--for organiztaional endeavors. There is another conversation, though, that has been emerging in the past few years, and is getting stronger. It is a conversation about people being a central value of the workforce, and how its treatment is related to an organization's performance.

In The Human Equation: Building Profits By Putting People First (1998) Jeffrey Pfeffer contends that people--the workforce--greatly matter, must be valued, and must be compensated appropriately. He states that "high commitment management approaches" in organizations can enhance organizatinal performance. This occurs since:

• People work harder, because of the increases involvement and commitment that comes from having control over and say in their work.


• People work smarter; high performance management practices encourage the building of skills and competence and, as importantly, facilitate the efforts of people in actually apply their wisdom and energy to enhancing organizational performance.


• High commitment management practices, by placing more responsibility in the hands of people farther down in the organization, save on administrative overhead as well as other costs associated with having an alienated workforce in an adversarial relationship to management (p. 33).
  

Organizations can be profitable while putting people first. Such organizations have the following characteristics:

• Employment security.


• Selective hiring of new personnel.


• Self-managed teams and decentralization of decision making as the basic principle of organizational design.


• Comparatively high compensation contingent on organizational performance.


• Extensive training.


• Reduced status distinctions and barriers, including dress, language, office arrangements, and wage differences across levels.


• Extensive sharing of financial and performance information throughout the organization (p. 65).
  

For Rodd Wagner and James Harter (2006) of the famed Gallup Organization, the "heart of great managing" is not merely about expertise and skill.

The managers who are the best at getting the most from people
are those who give the most to them. Those who create the greatest financial
performance start with the least pecuniary motivations. They work hard to do the
right thing for their people, and they end up doing well. (12: The Elements of Great
Managing, p. 203)

For Wagner and Harter employees want and need:

• To know what is expected of them and that their ideas and perspectives count.


• A welcoming and caring work environment where they can utilize their talents and grow as a professionals, where their colleagues are competent and strive to do quality work, and where all have the needed resources to do their job.


• To do their best in a friendly, engaging workplace that challenges, encourages, and enables them to both do well and expand their knowledge and skills.
  

To explore their notion of enagagement more fully, see their 12 elements posted on the Gallup website.

Lastly, Lynda Gratton (2000) in Living Strategy: Putting People at the Heart of Corporate Purpose holds the following hope for management and human resource practices:

For organizational leaders:

• Dream collectively about the future of the organization and world in which it operates.


• Balance the short term with the longer term, understanding the past history and present situation of the organization, and where it can go.


• Build an organization that values people.


• Understand the reality of the organization.

For human resource management professionals:

• Build the business case for people where "soft measures" such as trust and commitment are understood as integrally related to "hard measures" such as company performance.


• Create a compelling people strategy.


• View the organization as a complex system.


• Create just and fair practices.


• Create a capacity for the organization and its workforce to revitalize (pp.204-209).

So, from your professional experience...

• How do you understand these ideas and perspectives?


• While they all are based in emperical research, are they realistic and viable perspectives?


• What are the importance and ramifications of these ideas for successfully managing, as well as operating, a successful enterprise in today's competitive environment?

Click on "comments" below to post your thoughts and insights.

Taking a Look at the American Workplace

There is no doubt, the 21st century workplace will be vastly different than that of the late 1990s. Many researchers are trying to chart these changes, exploring the shifts taking place in the American workforce, and discussing how to address the challenges they pose.

Some conclusions raised by James O'Toole and Edward E. Lawler III in their 2006 book The New American Workplace are:

1. Insufficient creation of new jobs. As manufacturing jobs disappear, "new, higher-value-added, higher-paying service-sector jobs" should be appearing. The expected volume of such new jobs has not occurred.

2. Increased choice and risk. Workers today face a wider array of choices than ever before, choices concerning what career to pursue, how much and what form of education to obtain, where to work, how to mesh work with other aspects of life, when to change jobs and careers, how to make trade-offs among benefits, and when, or if, to retire.

3. Increased influence of competitive and economic drivers. The decisions employers make about the pay, benefits, and working conditions they offer are increasingly driven by competitive and financial considerations.

4. Increased tension between work and family life. Men and women in all categories of employment—front line, technical, managerial, and professional—cite a desire for greater balance between work and other aspects of life, particularly their family lives.

5. Mismatch between skills and business needs. The primary and secondary educational system in the US is failing to provide the skills millions of workers need to escape minimum-wage and dead-end employment.

6. Increased social stratification based largely on educational attainment. Related to the problems in education are signs of increasing workforce stratification, with clear winners and losers and decreasing economic mobility. In terms of real wages, executives and technically skilled workers have fared spectacularly in recent years, and college graduates, in general, have relatively fared well. Blue-collar workers, though, have significantly lagged behind their educated and white-collar peers.

7. Changing nature of careers. The traditional career path of completing one’s education and then working for a single organization until retirement is all but disappeared. Individuals expect to work for multiple employers, to move back and forth between work and education and between work and family responsibilities, and perhaps, never retire.

8. Reduction in community commitment. New employment contracts and the high rate of employee turnover have reduced the opportunity for workers to satisfy their needs for belonging to supportive workplace communities.

9. Shortcoming of the healthcare system. The major public policy issue related to work in America today is the nation’s long-standing and unaddressed healthcare crisis. While many workers have no healthcare, concerns abouth health insurance coverage limit the mobility of workers and create dysfunctional tension between labor and management.

10. The boomer demographic imperative. Depending on public and private choices that must be made soon, in the near future there may be (a) a shortage of skilled workers, (b) a shortage of for older workers who cannot afford to retire, (c) a rapid decline in the demand for goods and services as boomers retire with insufficient incomes, (d) steady economic growth as boomers continue to make economic contributions well into their 70s and 80s, (e) the end of retirement as we know it, (f) a demand for increased immigration, or (g) all, some, or none the above.

11. Unrealized opportunities to make more effective use of human capital. Current workplace practices, such as the use of contingent and part-time workers, preferences for younger over older workers, underfunding of training, growing gaps between the salaries and benefits of executives and average employees, and a 24/7 working environment, appear to be having negative effects on worker turnover, motivation, loyalty, and job satisfaction. Yet there exist a number of underutilized workplace “best practices”: flexible working hours, company-sponsored tuition reimbursement, benefit for part-timers, employee participation in decision-making and profit sharing, the redesigning of jobs to make them challenging, and the providing of on-the-job developmental opportunities.

So, in light of your professional experience:

• How do you understand or interprete these findings?


• Which to you agree with? Which do you think are not accurrate? Why?

Click on "comments" below to post your thoughts and insights.