New Business Ideas 4 U

Posts Tagged ‘Human Resource Management’

HR Sacred Cow 5     All Staff should get the Same Bonus based on Company Performance

Another Toyota why?

Professors Becker, Huselid and Beatty, authors of The Differentiated Workforce, are very forthright about this situation, as shown in the quotation used in the last posting.

They – and I  – would criticize the practice on at least three grounds:

• It does not discriminate between positions – “A”positions and position holders get the same as “C” positions and position holders
• The practice of one bonus for everybody fails to recognize the fact that some positions are vastly more important than others in the achievement of organizational strategic goals
• It does not account for variability in performance of various jobholders

• Not all accounts supervisors supervise equally well, nor do bank tellers all tell equally

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HR Sacred Cow 3     There should be a Standard Approach to Evaluating and Rewarding Jobs and Jobholders.

Let’s borrow directly from our authors on this one. On pages 53-4 in The Differentiated Workforce, under the heading of Traditional Approaches are not the Answer, they say this:

‘Conventional approaches to job design use attributes of employees and the environment within which they work (in contrast to the strategy that must be executed) as the primary criteria to determine job structure. Historically, most large firms have used complex job-evaluation systems to allocate points to jobs, rank them, then locate these jobs in the firm’s pay system on the basis of these points. For example, the Hay system for job evaluation prices jobs based on the relative value of skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions of a particular job. The typical job evaluation process allocates points to benchmark jobs, then the remaining jobs are placed in the hierarchy. This process drives a number of organizational decisions, most notably compensation … … the conventional approach looks both internally and to history for its definition of value; what we need is an approach based on future value creation and strategic job worth.’

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HR Sacred Cow 1     It’s HR’s job to Look after the People in the Company

Why is this sacred cow?

Let me share a true story. I was once taken to task by the assistant HR manager of a company to which I was consulting. I had proposed a change to the company structure, which included a change in the way the sales forces were paid. The lady bailed me up one day – almost literally ‘spitting tacks’. “You have no right to interfere with my staff” she spat. “Madam”, I replied, “you have no staff”. She became apoplectic, to the extent I deemed it expedient to withdraw – from the scene, not from the remark.

I am so glad that some few years later, the learned professorial authors of The Differentiated Workforce have justified my stand.

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Immunity to Change

Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, Harvard Business Press, 2009

After more than 40 years in the HR business, I thought I knew most of it. This was my ‘big assumption’. Kegan and Lahey know a great deal more than me, I found out, and I thank them for sharing a generation of experience with me – and I hope, you too.

The authors seem to have found the answer to why people find it difficult to change – as you have doubtless found it difficult to change some of your staff. Their discovery is startlingly simple. Most people have an immunity to change. Their research over many years and thousands of people has drawn them to this conclusion, and in this gem of a book, they share their findings with us.

They show how this immunity comes about, how to identify what the immunity – or blockage – to change actually is, and most importantly, how to use their research findings in developmental  activity with your staff and even staff teams.

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