2.5.4 Ask Your Staff To Complete The Sentence - “If Only …”
“The average person who works at the front line of your organisation is talented, loyal, thoughtful, caring, dynamic, energetic and creative except for the eight hours a day they work for you”. Like most of business guru Tom Peter’s pronouncements, this statement is big on hyperbole but contains a kernel of truth.
But whose fault is it?
Clearly it’s management for failing to tap into the latent qualities of their employees. And, in the current economic climate every organisation needs to identify and address all factors, however small, that detract from its operational efficiency – the “one per centers”.
I’m not talking about Employee Suggestion Schemes or brainstorming sessions. I’m talking about “If only ... ” meetings.
I have always been a strong advocate of regular reviews of the Strategic Business Plan. Is your company meeting budget and if it isn’t, do you know why? Is the implementation awry or are one or more of the underlying assumptions upon which the Plan was based no longer valid? If you are doing it tough now or foresee a rocky road ahead, you not only need to keep your staff informed but you also need to tap into those qualities that Tom Peters suggests your staff leave at home.
I ran such a review recently with a company with whom I had worked on developing a business plan. It was a one day meeting where we reviewed the actions resulting from the initial Plan and then considered the assumptions on which the Plan was based. If there were any significant changes we looked at the implications for the Plan and modified it accordingly. Before developing the Action Plan, we held the “if only ... ” session.
It’s essential to the success of this exercise that the participants be given advanced notice. What we wanted was for people to think about the small things that detract from the efficiency with which they do their particular job. Things that probably only they know about and which they tend to put up with rather than seek to eliminate. They were told that each of them would be asked to table the “if only … ” and then the participants would discuss ways of addressing it.
Not surprisingly, communication of information forms the bulk of “if only ... ” frustrations. There are six basic situations.
- Lack of information
- The right information
- The timeliness of information
- Information in the form desired by the recipient
- The medium used to transmit it
- Sharing of information
In second place was unnecessary paperwork or duplication of paperwork. In third place were omissions or unnecessary steps in procedures or processes.
As organisations fundamentally change the way they operate from ones based on function to ones based on process, the number of “if only’s ... ” will increase. It relates back to the concept of “I” and “T” shaped members of cross-functional workgroups. When management starts to regard order fulfilment, for example, as a multi-stage continuous process rather than as a series of separate and independent functions, communication of information from one part of the process to another becomes crucial to overall performance.
If the organisation is re-structured around cross-functional workgroups to reflect the major processes that the organisation undertakes, both the need to adopt “T” shaped thinking and the consequent uncovering of “if only’s ... " will accelerate.
Some “if only ... ” moments are hard to believe. I recall an instance where the regional offices did their sales estimates on a rolling four monthly basis. So in January, they would estimate sales for January, February, March and April. Hence every month was the subject of four forecasts, the rationale being that these forecasts would become increasingly accurate. Distribution consolidated the sales forecasts and gave them to Production on 7th of the month in question.
There was only one problem. Production produced their own production program by the 25th of the previous month. A classic “if only ... ” in what was at the time, a highly functional organisation, dominated by “I” thinking people.
In contrast, the CEO of a Melbourne based manufacturer once said: “We have what we call the 20’ rule, which means that if anybody knows how to fix a problem, it’s the people within 20’ of a particular operation. People like me would be the last to know how to fix it. What we can do is to create the right environment to let it happen”.
You will be pleasantly surprised at the efficiency gains that will accrue if you address the issues uncovered by asking your staff to complete that sentence beginning with "If only ... "