This Oakwood trainer is currently involved in four separate culture change programmes:
• In three different high tech, light engineering manufacturers with very stable workforces, helping supervisors, junior leaders and middle managers take on a more strategic viewpoint and leadership behaviours.
• In a new start-up heavy engineering organisation, helping the team in one function to ‘toughen up’ and gain more general business awareness to better equip them to negotiate with their colleagues in other departments.
Three observations:
• Firstly, in each programme, one of the symptoms of each of the organisations’ underlying cultural problems is a wide disregard for the process and benefits of performance management: non-SMART or absent personal objectives; what objectives there were being kept secret by managers and staff; no monitoring or recording of the evidence of performance, an unwillingness to meet regularly to discuss performance. Once managers take performance management seriously they start to manage well.
• Secondly, culture change programmes that are not thoroughly and aggressively supported and promoted (championed) by the highest levels of management seem to fail quickly and badly.
• Thirdly, one Training Manager had a good view on culture change. He said ‘When we tried to introduce a ‘nil defects’ culture into a new aircraft maintenance unit, we got the policies, structures and procedures right, did all the training, and it STILL took fifteen years until the culture was completely embedded. I’ve got a plan for at least the next five years to get the culture right here. I can wait.’
So… performance management, support and patience: three routes to culture change.
Monday, 18 July 2011
Friday, 8 July 2011
Why ‘Oakwood’?
Students regularly ask Oakwood International trainers why the company is called ‘Oakwood’. So here’s why.
Oak trees grow in many countries but are particularly associated with England. They live many hundreds of years and are among the oldest trees in the UK: many live on after fires, lightning strikes and other disasters. They are not the tallest trees in the British countryside but are the most robust, handsome and impressive. They are excellent trees to climb and in summer their foliage is thick enough to provide excellent shade from the sun or shelter from the rain.
Oaks have long been associated the best in British culture. English sailors were described as having ‘hearts of oak’. King Charles II hid in an oak tree during the English civil war, and in fiction both Robin Hood and Winnie the Pooh lived in oak trees. In the British rock band Queen, Brian May plays a ‘Red Special’ guitar that he and his father made from an old oak fireplace. A famous English proverb, illustrating how great ideas and businesses develop, is ‘from little acorns mighty oaks do grow’.
The wood of the oak tree is not just good for guitars. It is also one of the UK’s strongest and most useful building materials. Long before ships were made from iron, the Royal Navy and merchant navy sailed ships made of oak. Original oak beams still support the UK’s oldest inhabited houses, churches, barns and public buildings, 500 to 1000 years after they were built. They were often built with ‘green’, recently cut, oak, which then shrank and hardened as it aged, making the buildings more rigid. Oak has the unusual quality of becoming stronger and stiffer as it ages, so that in very old buildings the oak beams have taken on the characteristics of concrete. And although oak can burn, it burns slowly and does not lose strength quickly, so that oak-built houses are fire-safe.
But oak is not just a material from the past. It’s a green renewable resource – easy to shape and sculpt – that has been used in some of the most exciting new architectural projects and interior designs of recent years. As well as having superb structural qualities, it also looks good.
So Oakwood is here for the long term. It will help you climb and keep you safe. It comes from a strong and robust culture. It will you help you build your business and your career. And it will go on being useful and relevant in the future.
That’s why we chose to call our business ‘Oakwood’.
Oak trees grow in many countries but are particularly associated with England. They live many hundreds of years and are among the oldest trees in the UK: many live on after fires, lightning strikes and other disasters. They are not the tallest trees in the British countryside but are the most robust, handsome and impressive. They are excellent trees to climb and in summer their foliage is thick enough to provide excellent shade from the sun or shelter from the rain.
Oaks have long been associated the best in British culture. English sailors were described as having ‘hearts of oak’. King Charles II hid in an oak tree during the English civil war, and in fiction both Robin Hood and Winnie the Pooh lived in oak trees. In the British rock band Queen, Brian May plays a ‘Red Special’ guitar that he and his father made from an old oak fireplace. A famous English proverb, illustrating how great ideas and businesses develop, is ‘from little acorns mighty oaks do grow’.
The wood of the oak tree is not just good for guitars. It is also one of the UK’s strongest and most useful building materials. Long before ships were made from iron, the Royal Navy and merchant navy sailed ships made of oak. Original oak beams still support the UK’s oldest inhabited houses, churches, barns and public buildings, 500 to 1000 years after they were built. They were often built with ‘green’, recently cut, oak, which then shrank and hardened as it aged, making the buildings more rigid. Oak has the unusual quality of becoming stronger and stiffer as it ages, so that in very old buildings the oak beams have taken on the characteristics of concrete. And although oak can burn, it burns slowly and does not lose strength quickly, so that oak-built houses are fire-safe.
But oak is not just a material from the past. It’s a green renewable resource – easy to shape and sculpt – that has been used in some of the most exciting new architectural projects and interior designs of recent years. As well as having superb structural qualities, it also looks good.
So Oakwood is here for the long term. It will help you climb and keep you safe. It comes from a strong and robust culture. It will you help you build your business and your career. And it will go on being useful and relevant in the future.
That’s why we chose to call our business ‘Oakwood’.
Thursday, 30 June 2011
Flat profiles: the trouble with 360° assessment
360° assessment is a somewhat silly name for a very sensible process. A person’s work, competencies, knowledge, attitudes, behaviour etc. is appraised and reviewed not just by their boss but by a number of their colleagues (line manager, direct reports, peers and other stakeholders). These various individual appraisals are then combined to give a summary, which although not completely objective, SHOULD be more balanced and fair than a single person’s view.
The trouble with this is that by averaging the responses of a group, the summary report tends to be rather bland and ‘flat’, evening out the more extreme strengths and development needs identified by individual respondents. And this means that the subjects of the 360° assessment get feedback that is itself often bland and non-specific: that they have no particular strengths or areas they can improve.
So what’s the answer? Firstly, ensure that the respondents to 360° questionnaires are briefed and trained so that they clearly identify how the subjects differ from the norm, both positively and negatively. Secondly, make sure that the process is as anonymous as possible, so that respondents feel able to respond honestly without the chance of being identified by the subject. (Clearly this is difficult if there is only small number of respondents.) Thirdly, check that the 360° output reports give all the individual responses as as well as the summary responses. (This is made more difficult, given the need for anonymity above.) Lastly, make sure that the person giving feedback to the subject, and possibly the subject themselves, have some training in how to interpret the reports and tease out the strengths and development needs from the bland numbers.
If none of that helps, some new research reported in Assessment & Development Matters (The Official Publication of The Psychological Testing Centre, part of the British Psychological Society Vol. 3 No. 2 Summer 2011) may help. Rob Feltham, Nik Kinley and Kate Young tell of an attempt to create a different kind of 360° assessment – ‘ipsative’ rather than ‘normative’ – that does not generate flat summary reports. It’s not a perfect alternative but could be a useful addition to an organisation’s HR and performance management armoury. See http://www.bpsshop.org.uk/Assessment-Development-Matters-Vol-3-No-2-Summer-2011-P1472.aspx
The trouble with this is that by averaging the responses of a group, the summary report tends to be rather bland and ‘flat’, evening out the more extreme strengths and development needs identified by individual respondents. And this means that the subjects of the 360° assessment get feedback that is itself often bland and non-specific: that they have no particular strengths or areas they can improve.
So what’s the answer? Firstly, ensure that the respondents to 360° questionnaires are briefed and trained so that they clearly identify how the subjects differ from the norm, both positively and negatively. Secondly, make sure that the process is as anonymous as possible, so that respondents feel able to respond honestly without the chance of being identified by the subject. (Clearly this is difficult if there is only small number of respondents.) Thirdly, check that the 360° output reports give all the individual responses as as well as the summary responses. (This is made more difficult, given the need for anonymity above.) Lastly, make sure that the person giving feedback to the subject, and possibly the subject themselves, have some training in how to interpret the reports and tease out the strengths and development needs from the bland numbers.
If none of that helps, some new research reported in Assessment & Development Matters (The Official Publication of The Psychological Testing Centre, part of the British Psychological Society Vol. 3 No. 2 Summer 2011) may help. Rob Feltham, Nik Kinley and Kate Young tell of an attempt to create a different kind of 360° assessment – ‘ipsative’ rather than ‘normative’ – that does not generate flat summary reports. It’s not a perfect alternative but could be a useful addition to an organisation’s HR and performance management armoury. See http://www.bpsshop.org.uk/Assessment-Development-Matters-Vol-3-No-2-Summer-2011-P1472.aspx
Wednesday, 22 June 2011
Are you a good judge of other people?
Many of us think we are good judges of others and that we can ‘know’ people within the first few minutes (or even seconds) of first meeting them. Most of us are wrong.
A recent book by Ian Leslie called Born Liars: why we can’t live without deceit (Quercus Publishing plc) summarises lots of the psychological research conducted in this area. It makes sobering reading. For example, one experiment showed that people were able to accurately spot liars only 47% of the time: in other words they would have done better by basing their decisions on the flip of a coin.
Part of the reason for this seems to be that, all over the world, there is a common idea of how liars behave: liars seem uncertain, they make less eye contact, they blink more, they move their hands and feet and make extravagant gestures, they say they can’t remember, they can seem surly or uncooperative, they digress, they recount events out of order.
Unfortunately, the research seems to indicate that good liars – and most of us can be good liars when the need arises – do not exhibit any of these behaviours more than people telling the truth. Indeed, good liars often seem less nervous and more coherent, empathetic, helpful and charming.
So in vital HR situations, such as recruitment, back-to-work or exit interviews, or in performance management meetings, for example, how can we judge the people we are talking to?
Some research seems to show that people’s facial ‘micro expressions’ are directly linked to what they are thinking and feeling; that these expressions are hard to fake and impossible to completely hide even if they do not last long. But most of us need training and practise to be able to read the faces of others completely.
Other research seems to show that when a person creates and maintains a lie they have to hold onto a lot of information, and that if we increase the load (by asking detailed and specific questions) and then closely attend to the person’s words, we can spot where the information starts to break down.
So there’s the solid psychological and scientific reason why competence-based questions are so important in recruitment interviews, and why similar specific situation-based questions are so useful elsewhere too.
One final piece of good news though about making snap decisions about people we meet: we may be able to judge how conscientious they are from the way they shake hands. Look at http://www.bps.org.uk/news/handshakes
A recent book by Ian Leslie called Born Liars: why we can’t live without deceit (Quercus Publishing plc) summarises lots of the psychological research conducted in this area. It makes sobering reading. For example, one experiment showed that people were able to accurately spot liars only 47% of the time: in other words they would have done better by basing their decisions on the flip of a coin.
Part of the reason for this seems to be that, all over the world, there is a common idea of how liars behave: liars seem uncertain, they make less eye contact, they blink more, they move their hands and feet and make extravagant gestures, they say they can’t remember, they can seem surly or uncooperative, they digress, they recount events out of order.
Unfortunately, the research seems to indicate that good liars – and most of us can be good liars when the need arises – do not exhibit any of these behaviours more than people telling the truth. Indeed, good liars often seem less nervous and more coherent, empathetic, helpful and charming.
So in vital HR situations, such as recruitment, back-to-work or exit interviews, or in performance management meetings, for example, how can we judge the people we are talking to?
Some research seems to show that people’s facial ‘micro expressions’ are directly linked to what they are thinking and feeling; that these expressions are hard to fake and impossible to completely hide even if they do not last long. But most of us need training and practise to be able to read the faces of others completely.
Other research seems to show that when a person creates and maintains a lie they have to hold onto a lot of information, and that if we increase the load (by asking detailed and specific questions) and then closely attend to the person’s words, we can spot where the information starts to break down.
So there’s the solid psychological and scientific reason why competence-based questions are so important in recruitment interviews, and why similar specific situation-based questions are so useful elsewhere too.
One final piece of good news though about making snap decisions about people we meet: we may be able to judge how conscientious they are from the way they shake hands. Look at http://www.bps.org.uk/news/handshakes
Tuesday, 14 June 2011
Intern induction: a best practice route to high-potential graduate employees
Oakwood International trainers have won the opportunity to design and deliver part of the induction process for a large cohort of interns for a UK-based multinational organisation. It’s interesting work.
Some background. Internships are fixed-term unpaid or low paid ‘office’ jobs done by students in their holidays or following graduation. The students involved are often high performers and their living and travelling costs often provided by their families. They often get the internships through family or business connections and their recruitment and induction is often unsystematic and unregulated, no more than an informal agreement between their ‘managers’ and their parents.
In the USA, internships are a way of life in politics, the media, the creative industries and many large companies: a means for young people to get work experience and make connections in high status organisations; and a means for organisations to get high-volume, high-quality work at very low cost.
But internships have come in for some mixed press in the UK recently. Nick Clegg, deputy Prime Minister, announced some weeks ago that he wanted to regulate the practice, so that internships are available to any able students who want them, and not just to those with wealthy families and connections to top people. Clegg’s boss, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, disagreed, saying he saw no problem with the current state-of-affairs. He argued that adding layers of complexity to something not important enough, or not broke enough, to need fixing seemed a waste of energy in these cost-aware times.
But the work Oakwood is involved with is nothing like this. The hundreds of students involved have all gone through a rigorous recruitment process designed and managed by the organisation’s HR team. They are high performers but their family connections and private wealth have not been a factor in their recruitment. They will be paid a living wage during their ten-week internship. They will each receive one week concentrated off-site induction, involving intensive training in the organisation and divisional mission, vision, strategy, structure, culture and practice, as well a wider introduction to effective business behaviour (provided by the Oakwood trainers). Once in role they will have regular one-to-ones with their managers and they will also be required to arrange and run separate meetings with other senior managers in the business.
Past experience within the business has shown that:
• the majority of these interns go on to become the organisation’s high-potential graduate recruits
• the majority of the organisation’s high-potential graduate intake come from this intern programme
In other words, the money and time invested on this intern programme is more than paid back by the work of the graduates eventually recruited as permanent staff.
Watch this space for further reports about this programme and Oakwood’s involvement.
Some background. Internships are fixed-term unpaid or low paid ‘office’ jobs done by students in their holidays or following graduation. The students involved are often high performers and their living and travelling costs often provided by their families. They often get the internships through family or business connections and their recruitment and induction is often unsystematic and unregulated, no more than an informal agreement between their ‘managers’ and their parents.
In the USA, internships are a way of life in politics, the media, the creative industries and many large companies: a means for young people to get work experience and make connections in high status organisations; and a means for organisations to get high-volume, high-quality work at very low cost.
But internships have come in for some mixed press in the UK recently. Nick Clegg, deputy Prime Minister, announced some weeks ago that he wanted to regulate the practice, so that internships are available to any able students who want them, and not just to those with wealthy families and connections to top people. Clegg’s boss, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, disagreed, saying he saw no problem with the current state-of-affairs. He argued that adding layers of complexity to something not important enough, or not broke enough, to need fixing seemed a waste of energy in these cost-aware times.
But the work Oakwood is involved with is nothing like this. The hundreds of students involved have all gone through a rigorous recruitment process designed and managed by the organisation’s HR team. They are high performers but their family connections and private wealth have not been a factor in their recruitment. They will be paid a living wage during their ten-week internship. They will each receive one week concentrated off-site induction, involving intensive training in the organisation and divisional mission, vision, strategy, structure, culture and practice, as well a wider introduction to effective business behaviour (provided by the Oakwood trainers). Once in role they will have regular one-to-ones with their managers and they will also be required to arrange and run separate meetings with other senior managers in the business.
Past experience within the business has shown that:
• the majority of these interns go on to become the organisation’s high-potential graduate recruits
• the majority of the organisation’s high-potential graduate intake come from this intern programme
In other words, the money and time invested on this intern programme is more than paid back by the work of the graduates eventually recruited as permanent staff.
Watch this space for further reports about this programme and Oakwood’s involvement.
Monday, 6 June 2011
HR on TV
Do you want to add references to your assignments that are easy and fun to digest? Do you want some straightforward routes to best practice? Do you like television?
If your answer to all these questions is ‘Yes’ then here’s what you can do: watch your favourite workplace-set TV shows, not for the plot, characterisation, stunts or set dressing, but rather for the human resources issues on display. Reality shows such as The Apprentice are the obvious place to start. But there are also documentaries and many fictional dramas and comedies set in organisations.
In The West Wing and Yes Minister we see the inner workings of government. In 30 Rock, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and Frazier we see inside broadcast media companies. Boston Legal and Ally McBeal showed us legal practices. And there are more police procedural and hospital dramas than anyone can ever watch. All regularly feature HR issues underlying the foreground stories.
Best of all is probably The Office: an American Workplace, where the regular character Toby is a busy HR Business Partner in a small business unit of a larger organisation. And of course, this programme is the US spin-off of the UK comedy The Office.
None of these programmes show us best practice. Often the organisations will not be depicted realistically and the issues will be handled quickly and at low levels of detail. But that’s a good thing: they can certainly show us what NOT to do, which can lead us toward best practice.
And working out HR issues in these fictional worlds can be involving and challenging, with none of the risks of doing it for real in our own organisations.
I know what I’m doing tonight. Why don’t you join in: put your feet up, get your notebook out, put your ‘HR goggles’ on and watch your favourite workplace-set TV show.
If your answer to all these questions is ‘Yes’ then here’s what you can do: watch your favourite workplace-set TV shows, not for the plot, characterisation, stunts or set dressing, but rather for the human resources issues on display. Reality shows such as The Apprentice are the obvious place to start. But there are also documentaries and many fictional dramas and comedies set in organisations.
In The West Wing and Yes Minister we see the inner workings of government. In 30 Rock, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and Frazier we see inside broadcast media companies. Boston Legal and Ally McBeal showed us legal practices. And there are more police procedural and hospital dramas than anyone can ever watch. All regularly feature HR issues underlying the foreground stories.
Best of all is probably The Office: an American Workplace, where the regular character Toby is a busy HR Business Partner in a small business unit of a larger organisation. And of course, this programme is the US spin-off of the UK comedy The Office.
None of these programmes show us best practice. Often the organisations will not be depicted realistically and the issues will be handled quickly and at low levels of detail. But that’s a good thing: they can certainly show us what NOT to do, which can lead us toward best practice.
And working out HR issues in these fictional worlds can be involving and challenging, with none of the risks of doing it for real in our own organisations.
I know what I’m doing tonight. Why don’t you join in: put your feet up, get your notebook out, put your ‘HR goggles’ on and watch your favourite workplace-set TV show.
Friday, 27 May 2011
Avoid presenteeism and increase productivity with alternative working methods
Everybody has unproductive days at work sometimes – management focus, natural peaks and troughs in work rate and work flow, health, outside commitments and many other factors contribute – but it is in every organisations’ interest to maximise productivity. Absenteeism can be managed effectively by ensuring that all staff get a back-to-work interview when they return to the business. So how do we manage and reduce presenteeism: employees attending work when they are sick, or even just staying around beyond the time needed for effective performance?
There’s some good evidence that the ideal model in terms of productivity is for employees to work as hard as possible for an average or shorter working week, rather than to work longer hours at a lower intensity. This also looks like a good route to a fair and health-enhancing Work/Life Balance. But the UK for example has some of the longest working hours in Western Europe, with some of the lowest productivity results: good neither for organisational finances nor for employees’ lives.
The HR approach to increasing work intensity and productivity is obvious. Recruit the right people based on competence and potential, invest in their development, and ensure that their managers use all the proven tools to maximise their effectiveness and empowerment: especially coaching and performance management.
It’s also worth considering alternative ways of working too, all of which can increase productivity while reducing unnecessary attendance.
• Flexitime (flextime in the USA): core hours are, for example, 10.00am to 3.00pm in the working week, with earlier start and finish times, between 7.00am and 7.00pm say, flexibly decided by the worker and/or agreed with their manager or team, so that the total number of hours per week, month or year meets the organisation’s policy. (Pros: more employee choice, better match of availability to workload, environmental benefits as workers are not all commuting at the same time. Cons: needs attentive management and systems, continuous dialogue between staff and managers, and promotion of the system to full-time workers and other stakeholders.)
• Staggered shifts: pre-agreed start and finishing times varying between team members, with a core hour overlap similar to flexitime. (Pros and Cons also similar to flexitime.)
• Compressed working week: say, four 10-hour days rather than five eight-hour days per week. (Pros: can suit people able to concentrate for longer, gives employees bigger blocks of time off. Cons: can leave teams short staffed at times, can impact negatively on productivity for some workers.)
• Part-time: 16 hours per week or less in the UK. Experience shows that part-time workers are often more motivated than full-time workers to keep their productivity up and their hours down to the contracted amount. (Pros: can attract and retain high quality employees who cannot or do not want to undertake full-time work. Cons: full-time workers need monitoring and encouragement to treat part-timers as equals.)
• Job-share: two or more part-time workers sharing a single role. (Pros and cons similar to part-time.)
• Hot-desking: rather than set individual work stations or desks, employees can work anywhere in a shared work space, with their materials, equipment and belongings cleared away and kept in lockers when they are not working. (Pros: forces employees to plan and organise better, works especially well with staff not based in one workplace all the time, reduces the physical space necessary for a team to work. Cons: hated by many workers for being too unsettling, can be seen as a way to cut costs rather than increase productivity.)
• Home-based working, telecommuting or ‘homeshoring’: employees are based in their own home office, communicating via the web and telephone to colleagues and stakeholders. (Pros: physical space and cost is saved at the main workplace, employees reduce ‘dead’ commuting to almost nothing, staff get to wear and eat what they like. Cons: not available to all roles, managers need to trust, brief and monitor their employees, reduces face-to-face communication, employment contracts need to be more complex and more explicit.)
So… ways to help your people get more done while spending less time working.
There’s some good evidence that the ideal model in terms of productivity is for employees to work as hard as possible for an average or shorter working week, rather than to work longer hours at a lower intensity. This also looks like a good route to a fair and health-enhancing Work/Life Balance. But the UK for example has some of the longest working hours in Western Europe, with some of the lowest productivity results: good neither for organisational finances nor for employees’ lives.
The HR approach to increasing work intensity and productivity is obvious. Recruit the right people based on competence and potential, invest in their development, and ensure that their managers use all the proven tools to maximise their effectiveness and empowerment: especially coaching and performance management.
It’s also worth considering alternative ways of working too, all of which can increase productivity while reducing unnecessary attendance.
• Flexitime (flextime in the USA): core hours are, for example, 10.00am to 3.00pm in the working week, with earlier start and finish times, between 7.00am and 7.00pm say, flexibly decided by the worker and/or agreed with their manager or team, so that the total number of hours per week, month or year meets the organisation’s policy. (Pros: more employee choice, better match of availability to workload, environmental benefits as workers are not all commuting at the same time. Cons: needs attentive management and systems, continuous dialogue between staff and managers, and promotion of the system to full-time workers and other stakeholders.)
• Staggered shifts: pre-agreed start and finishing times varying between team members, with a core hour overlap similar to flexitime. (Pros and Cons also similar to flexitime.)
• Compressed working week: say, four 10-hour days rather than five eight-hour days per week. (Pros: can suit people able to concentrate for longer, gives employees bigger blocks of time off. Cons: can leave teams short staffed at times, can impact negatively on productivity for some workers.)
• Part-time: 16 hours per week or less in the UK. Experience shows that part-time workers are often more motivated than full-time workers to keep their productivity up and their hours down to the contracted amount. (Pros: can attract and retain high quality employees who cannot or do not want to undertake full-time work. Cons: full-time workers need monitoring and encouragement to treat part-timers as equals.)
• Job-share: two or more part-time workers sharing a single role. (Pros and cons similar to part-time.)
• Hot-desking: rather than set individual work stations or desks, employees can work anywhere in a shared work space, with their materials, equipment and belongings cleared away and kept in lockers when they are not working. (Pros: forces employees to plan and organise better, works especially well with staff not based in one workplace all the time, reduces the physical space necessary for a team to work. Cons: hated by many workers for being too unsettling, can be seen as a way to cut costs rather than increase productivity.)
• Home-based working, telecommuting or ‘homeshoring’: employees are based in their own home office, communicating via the web and telephone to colleagues and stakeholders. (Pros: physical space and cost is saved at the main workplace, employees reduce ‘dead’ commuting to almost nothing, staff get to wear and eat what they like. Cons: not available to all roles, managers need to trust, brief and monitor their employees, reduces face-to-face communication, employment contracts need to be more complex and more explicit.)
So… ways to help your people get more done while spending less time working.
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