Archive for August, 2008

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After The Firings, What’s A Manger To Do?

Sunday, August 31st, 2008

How can a manager motivate a team after a round of layoffs?

Thanks to a sluggish economy, we’ve been reading about more and more layoffs, firings, staff reductions, rightsizing, etc. Your firm may have done one of these, be doing one, or just have started to think about doing one. No matter – letting staff go is can be one of the hardest parts about being a leader. There is a lot of information out there about how to let people go with dignity; however, there isn’t a lot of guidance on how to pick up the pieces after a big layoff. What’s a manager to do with those who escaped the executioner’s axe?

Since firing coworkers takes so much of a manager’s emotional energy, we can be excused for not remembering to take the time to adequately reassure those who are left onboard. Motivation is hard enough to do in the good times, re-motivation after a layoff is nigh impossible. As much of a challenge as this additional task is, it’s critical because studies have shown that the workers who remain quickly become unproductive and are unwilling to take on any risk now that they’ve seen what can happen to other workers. To top this off, all too often these disheartened workers end up leaving the company. Great – now you’ve gone from having to do layoffs to having to do interviews.

What’s A Manager To Do? A good place to start is to once again realize that every employee is an individual. This means that everyone will process the layoffs in their own personal way. A manager needs to let this happen. Dr. Warren Bennis is a professor of management out at the University of Southern California and he says that “Respect is the key word…” Layoffs often seems so cold and impersonal. It’s the job of a manger to work with the employees who remain and help them to understand why the layoffs are happening, acknowledge the pain that it is causing, and to let the employees know when the bloodletting will end. Having done all of this, then managers have to be able to sit back and listen. Allow the employees to react to the layoffs and realize that there are no right or wrong reactions.

What About Morale? Clearly one of the first victims of any layoff will be the morale of those employees who remain behind. One way that a manager can start to rekindle the light of motivation is to spend time with the remaining workers reviewing and discussing the organization’s goals. There are fewer people now and the key question will be how to achieve the goals with a smaller team. This is an important way to ensure that employees realize that they have a future with the company and they really will be better off once they are farther down the road.

Any Way To Future Proof An Organization? The ultimate question for any manager is if there is a way to prepare an organization for layoffs before they occur. The short answer is no. However, if a manager is able to keep the employees involved in discussions about how the business is doing, then there should never be any surprises if another round of layoffs occurs.

Have you been able to get a team of survivors motivated again after a layoff? How did you do it? What was your biggest challenge – team members or messages that the company was sending out? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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Posted in employee, employee motivation, firing, it, layoff, termination | 2 Comments »

Do You Suffer From "Munchausen At Work" Syndrome?

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

People who set fires in the workplace just to be heroes when they put them out suffer from munchausen at work syndrome

We all deal with problems that flare up at work, but some people do a better job than others. In fact, some people deal with workplace problems so often and do such a good job of dealing with them that they get awards, bonuses, and eventually promoted. Phred Dvorak over at the Wall Street Journal took a look at this situation and discovered something that most of us have suspected for a long time: some people are creating workplace problems and then jumping in to solve them. What’s up with this?

A business professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Nathan Bennett, has come up with the phrase “munchausen at work” to describe the phenomenon in which workers actually go about causing problems so that they can come back later on and take credit for fixing them. In the medical profession, there is an equivalent syndrome called “muncheausen” which is a mental illness in which someone makes someone else sick so that they can be a caregiver to them.

This workplace equivalent of arson is very hard to detect. The folks who set the fires are often the ones who show up when the problem is burning out of control and through their Herculean efforts are able to get the problem back under control. One reason that this behavior is hard to discourage is because companies often reward it with either recognition or promotions. Hey – it worked to get me promoted last time, why wouldn’t I use it again to get my next promotion?

In my career I’ve seen a lot of this. The challenge to the fire starters seems to be in determining just how big of a problem to cause. If it’s too small, they won’t get any recognition, if it’s too big they won’t be able to fix it or someone else will be brought in to solve the problem.

One interesting observation is that the munchausen at work syndrome is often seen among workers who have moved on to other jobs. They set fires so that they can swoop back in and solve them thus showing that they are still be best person for that job in the company.

You may be able to spot muncheausen at work staffers as they go about setting their fires. Common sparks that they set to dry timber include layoff rumors (so they can save your jobs), relationship problems (so they can “patch things up” between teammates), and reports of angry customers (so they can smooth things over with them and keep them as a customer).

Although the current downturn of the economy that we are experiencing may serve to reduce the number of fires set by munchausen at work suffers, spotting the deception is a good first step in stopping the behavior. Additional steps that you can take to put an end to this special form of workplace violence are:

  • Be sure to always stress teamwork over individual problem solving achievements.
  • Stay away from creating “office heroes” because it encourages munchausen syndrome.
  • Keep an eye peeled for information hoarders – they may be trying to start a fire.
  • Make sure that managers are always working to find out what employee needs are.

In this age of looser gun control laws, you might think that you’d be able to see any workplace problems walking down the hall towards you. However, munchausen at work may be a problem that you already have and yet didn’t realize it!

Have you ever worked for someone who suffered from munchausen at work? What kind of fires did they start and how did they put them out? Have you ever caused a problem at work with the hope of being asked to solve it? How did this work out for you? Leave a comment and let me know.

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Posted in information technology, IT employee, munchausen, personnel, promotion | 4 Comments »

Bad Money After Good: Preserving Your Employee Investment

Sunday, August 24th, 2008

How can you preserve the investment in your IT employees?

The great thing about talent portability in today’s IT market is that whenever you have a need to fill a position that requires a specialized set of skills or experiences, you can generally go shopping and find exactly what you need. The downside to this is the simple fact that your competition can do the same thing and they might be selecting from your employees!

Gone are the days in which firms developed their talent from within. Carefully nurturing those-who-would-be managers, giving them the training that they needed and rotating them among job assignments so that they would be ready when the trumpet sounded for them to take center stage in the Colosseum of business. Perhaps somewhat sadly, that model no longer exists.

Instead, today’s IT professionals are free to move on whenever a better opportunity presents itself. Applicant-tracking company Taleo has done a survey in which it was revealed that 80% of firms that participated in the survey have moved away from this “we know whats best for you” model to now starting to use internal job boards that are designed to make it easy for employees to apply for open positions and move around within the firm instead of leaving it. The poster child for this approach is Dow Chemical who was able to cut its turnover rate in half when it moved to using the internal job board approach to fill positions.

A small note of experience is probably due at this point. I’ve worked at a number of large firms in which it was mandatory that all openings were posted on the job board. However, the position was often already effectively filled by the posting manager long before the posting. Once the rest of the firm starts to understand that the job board is basically just window dressing, its value and its ability to retain staff goes down significantly.

What’s interesting about the shift to using a job board approach is that it moves the burden of managing an employee’s career from the company over to the employee. This has, of course, caused a great deal of chaos. The disconnect comes when an IT team member wants to move on to another job opportunity and his/her manager doesn’t want to let them go. Now we’ve got conflict! Welcome to the world of negotiations – somebody needs to be able to step in and find a way to preserve the investment that the company has made in this employee.

Different firms are finding different ways to deal with this issue. McKinsey tries to resolve this type of issue by (of course, it’s McKinsey after all) using rankings: how did the employee rank the job posing opportunity and how has the employee’s team ranked them on the current project that they are working on? If all of this analytical work does not resolve the issue, then the Senior Partner gets brought in to play the role of King Solomon. Before they imploded, Bears Sterns had created an office of mediation which took on the job of working out such differences between employees and their managers when an employee wanted to move on to another internal job.

In the end, the world of employee training and retention has been turned upside down. Where once firms were responsible for training and managing the careers of their employees, now that is no longer the case. Instead, the responsibility for managing one’s career is now the responsibility of each employee and training, which used to be a given, is now viewed in terms of its short term payback to the company. The old system of talent management had been set up along the lines of an engineering system: given a set of inputs, a predictable set of outputs would be produced. Today’s talent management is much more fluid. It is driven more by external market conditions and viewed through operations tools that are better able to adapt to increasing levels of uncertainty. It is possible to manage your pool of talent, you just need to update the tools that you are using to do it with.

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Posted in employee, IT jobs, IT manager, recruiting, retention | 1 Comment »

The ROI For Employee Training Crisis – Where Is the Money Going?

Thursday, August 21st, 2008

How can you maximize the ROI on the investment that you make in training your employees?

So you’ve decided that your department / team needs to get some fancy training. Great – more knowledge is always better right? Hold on a minute, maybe not. What happens if after you’ve paid for all of this wonderful training and even some certification (CISSP, CNE, PMP, etc.) your employee decides to walk out the door? That would be the workplace equivalent of buying a new car and then driving it off the lot and immediately totaling it by smashing it into a wall. What can you do to boost your chances of getting a good return on your investment (ROI)?

Staffing flexibility is a challenge without your pricey investments leaving once you’ve sunk your money into making them better than they were. Now I must confess that I am a sinner when it comes to taking the training and running. I ended up getting three additional college degrees that were paid for by my then employers. This might be just a bit different from what we’re talking about here because (1) that work was done at night, and (2) I hung around for at least 4 years each time so that I could finish the degree up. What we’re really talking about here is the more expensive stuff.

Once upon a time, when the only way to get new management was to grow it inside the company it was probably ok to not keep track of what kind of payback you were getting from your training dollars. However, now that company loyalty has gone the way of the pension, it’s probably a good time to take another look. Ultimately, training is an investment just like everything else the company spends its money on and you sure would like to maximize your return.

How to do this? One quick and easy way to get a better return on your training investment is to lower your costs. The fastest way to do this is to find a way to get your employees to share in the cost of the training. Sounds crazy doesn’t it? Here’s the thing: your employees fully understand that certain types of training will make them more valuable. Getting them to shoulder part of the cost may not be as difficult as you might think. Specifically, if the training is going to be accomplished by having the employee take on a learning project, then consider having them do this in addition to their normal job (this way you don’t have to hire in order to backfill their position). The employee gets valuable experience and access to other parts of the company. The cost to them is that they pay for it with their personal time.

A slightly more Draconian approach is to ask an employee who is preparing to receive some training to sign a contract stating that after they complete the training they will stick around for some minimum amount of time or they will be responsible for paying back some portion of the training costs. It turns out that about 20% of U.S. firms have some sort of system like this in place already. What’s interesting about this approach is that often times if the employee does decide to leave before their agreed to time is up, then the firm that hires the employee will end up paying the training fee. You will still miss the employee; however, your training budget will appreciate the pay back.

Finally, there is one more way to handle the issue of maximizing your return on training investments. If an employee that you’ve trained does leave, then perhaps keeping in touch with them and keeping them posted on changes and events at the firm would be a good idea. This is a relatively small investment and yet the next time that that employee decides to switch jobs, there is a good chance that if they’ve been kept in the loop then they may consider returning to work for your firm. Now that would be a real return on your training investment!

So which approach would work for your firm? Do you do any tracking today of what kind of return you are getting on your training investments? Do you feel that training an employee makes them more or less likely to leave once the training has been completed? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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Posted in employee motivation, employment, investment, retention strategies, training | 5 Comments »

Staffing Flexibility Is Soooo Underrated!

Monday, August 18th, 2008

Flexibility is needed in order to ensure that you will be able to staff your IT department

If you thought that just barely getting by using skills to manage your IT staffing needs using both home grown talent as well as warm bodies that you purchased off the street was tough, just imagine how challenging it is when you try to move things up one level and adapt your IT organization to the uncertainty in demand for IT talent. Just think about that for a moment: how would your life be different if instead of running around trying to fill holes in your organization as they occur, you could actually be ahead of the 8-ball and be ready for changes as they came?

Here’s a fundamental thought that will help you to solve this staffing problem once and for all. It’s based on lessons that our supply chain friends learned the hard way a long time ago. Instead of trying to stock your IT department with every body that you think that you might need both today and for the next x number of years, instead do what the supply chain guys do. Bring in small batches of what you need more often. This will allow you to not have to attempt to predict your staffing needs so very far out.

For a good example of how the current IT hiring/staffing process is broken, take a look at how recent college graduates are brought into the organization. Most firms do almost all of their new graduate hiring right after the students get out of college. This means there is a wave of new recruits that enter the firm in June. Even if you allow for some new-hire orientation and perhaps some training, the firm still has a need to carve out a substantial number of new-hire spots all at once. If the company is struggling in the current quarter, then this can be especially difficult.

A different way to handle this issue would be to take this single large problem and divide it into two smaller parts. Not all college graduates really want to go to work immediately after finishing 4, 5, or 6 years of intense schooling. Some would more than willing to delay their start date by 3-6 months. If this was done, then the firm would only have to process half as many new recruits at a time. More personal attention could be paid to each incoming employee and better fits for talents and interests could be made. Having fewer number of new hires to place but having them more often makes the staffing challenge much easier – you never have too many or too few. Retaining non-working students for 3-6 months can be as simple as agreeing to pay them 1/2 salary until they start working full time.

Long and expensive training programs present the same challenge. A two year management training program could be broken up into four 6 month programs. Each smaller program could have its own goals and forecasts. The benefit of doing training this way is that should an employee in training decide to leave the firm, then the entire training program expense may not have been spent on them.

Finally, within IT organizations different programs are often allowed to maintain and run their own talent management programs. The end result of this is that all too often, one program will have too many potential managers and another will have too few. Since there is no centralized way to communicate these supply issues, the firm generally just deals badly with the imbalance. If talent management within the IT department was centralized, then this issue would not occur.

So now we have an understanding of where to find IT talent and we now know how to deal with fluctuation in the need for IT talent, I guess the next thing that we should talk about would be how to improve the Return on Investment spent on developing employees…

How does IT staffing work at your firm? Do you seem to have waves of new employees sweep in every so often? Is your department set up to handle this flood of talent? Have you ever tried to manage the process by adding fewer new employees more often? What was the result? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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Posted in employee, employee motivation, it, personnel, staffing, training | No Comments »

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