It's easy to join the dots and say that making the most of your people should be a priority: focus on your people and the business will flourish. But employers can easily lose sight of their people, especially in times of economic stress.
In the 1990s I joined an entrepreneurial, forward-thinking and fast-growing business, HR and recruitment firm Morgan and Banks. One of the largest firms of its kind in the world, Morgan and Banks led from the front in terms of innovation and development. It was workplace utopia. I was in my early twenties and had lots of enthusiasm but little experience. Little did I realise how lucky I was. Whenever I catch up with colleagues from that time we always look back nostalgically. We worked our butts off, we made good money, we loved what we did and we had a ball working with each other. It was like the gold rush days for the corporates.
Geoff Morgan, one of the cofounders, was known for understanding and verbalising the fact that Morgan and Banks's assets (its people) were going up and down the lifts all day. Andrew Banks, the other cofounder, constantly drummed into us Peter Drucker's saying that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’. These guys instinctively knew that the value of their business was their people and they invested in them heavily via fun and powerful inductions, pragmatic and engaging professional development, mentoring programs and annual all-of-business conferences.
After the business was sold, the focus shifted from the people to the numbers. The conversations and strategy became about needing to improve, grow, cut back, double. We were not used to this. We were used to being asked how to build capability and motivation. Unsurprisingly, productivity decreased and maintaining profits became a challenge. It became difficult to retain the star performers, and people left.
Too many companies still haven't figured out that if they want the customer to come first they need to focus on cultivating a happy workplace: it's your people who are dealing with the customers.
Zappos, the largest online shoe retailer in the world, prides itself on its company culture, and it is well known for it. Does it come as any surprise that 75 per cent of purchases are from returning customers? That's an amazing statistic and is part of the reason Zappos was able to grow so quickly. One of its core values is ‘deliver WOW through service’. Zappos expects every employee to wow their customers and it does this by giving employees the autonomy to handle situations in any way they see fit.
Another organisation that is gaining more and more attention and success globally right now is Atlassian. Atlassian is a rapidly growing ‘software loving’ business that has won Business Review Weekly's ‘Best Place to Work’ twice, along with over 50 other awards (including top 20 Fortune Company, Deloitte Best Fast Growing IT and Hewitt's Best Employer) since it started in 2002. Even Dan Pink, author of the New York Times bestseller Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us, uses Atlassian as an example in one of his famous TED talks. He says that Atlassian is an ‘incredibly cool company’ that is focused on motivating its people by giving them autonomy. Pink says too many organisations are basing their decisions on outdated thinking. If we want high-performance cultures the solution is not to entice employees with a sweeter carrot or a bigger stick.
With a dogged focus on values in everything it does with its employees, customers and brand, it's no wonder Atlassian has highly engaged people – and a very successful business with unprecedented growth in an arguably flat economy. It invests heavily in its people and sees the difference it makes. It's Atlassian's edge, and the results speak for themselves.
If we don't invest in our people and give them the feedback they need, we can't expect to have a high-performing business. People won't know what they need to replicate and what they need to improve.
People matter. A lot.
The people noise is loud
We need to get the best from our people so our businesses can thrive. So we get it, right?! Right!
Then why is it that some of the biggest problems we have in organisations are our people? People, our greatest treasure, can also become our greatest liability. ‘People noise’ can become so loud sometimes that it makes it hard to implement anything. People noise is like white noise … it's always on in the background until we turn it off.
When I say ‘we’ I don't mean us or them. I mean you. The leader, the manager, the colleague. If you see there is something to be done then you need to do it. We often wait for someone else to take the lead, have that conversation, or set the tone. No wonder it doesn't happen. As Gandhi said, ‘Be the change that you wish to see in the world’.
Peter Drucker tells us that most of what we call ‘management’ consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done. Managers either create the people noise themselves or they don't turn it off when they need to. They don't lead.
The issues that demand most of our time are often the people ones. Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?
• You are trying to prepare your weekly report and John pops in to discuss an issue he has with the project leader's style and how it is affecting the team.
• You are delivering a strategy that will improve the productivity of the business but Tom does not want to work with Mary to deliver it. She's just too difficult.
• You are leading Sam's performance review and giving him feedback on his consistently late delivery. You go into a battle about who needs to take responsibility, as he says Jennifer keeps holding him back.
• You want to implement a new system that will provide a smoother approach when working with clients, but half of the team is divided because they will be more dependent on IT and they don't enjoy working with that area of the business.
People noise is our constant whether we recognise it or not. The success of a great strategy and its implementation hinges on how well people work together. Harnessing this power as not just a manager, but as a ‘doer’, and reducing the people noise makes the process of working together easier and, dare I say, more enjoyable.
The eighth consecutive study on engagement conducted by research company Gallup tells us that the cost of disengaged employees is deemed critical to a company's performance. The statistics are highly compelling. Some examples of a highly engaged workforce where people enjoy coming to work and working with each other suggest that there is:
• 65 per cent less turnover
• 37 per cent less absenteeism
• 48 per cent fewer safety incidents.
It is clear that minimising the people issues and creating a highly engaged workforce makes a difference. We're not talking about satisfaction for its own sake. We are talking about the cost implications of not investing in your people. More about this in chapter 2.
There are three options for dealing with the people noise.
1. Deal with people noise as it arises. Nip it in the bud so the spot fires don't become bushfires that end up being overwhelming or near impossible to address.
2. Deal with it poorly. Create even more issues by tackling the problems improperly or incompletely, damaging trust and respect in the process through inappropriate or aggressive communication.
3. Ignore them and hope they will go away. I call managers who do this ‘broken glass’ managers: they step over the broken glass in the middle of the room in the hope that someone else will clean up the mess. Don't be a broken-glass manager. Get out the brush and shovel and deal with it.
Most managers pick option three and end up sweeping the glass shards under the carpet. The next group takes option two and ‘attacks’ the issue or person and deals with it poorly, only to see that the approach is ineffectual and often makes things worse. That is the behaviour of a