0861 247 328

Why Creating a Winning Culture Matters

/in , , ,

By Dave Ulrich

Business success is not only about individual talent

Deloitte’s human capital trends for 2015 and 2016 found that organisation issues (culture, organisational design) were the top human resource (HR) issues. Some companies (Disney, Marriott) are trying to maintain their culture, others want to change it (General Electric, Apple), and others want to embed it (Google, Facebook). Top HR leaders share the same message: the war for talent is evolving and needs to evolve toward creating victory through organisation.

Read more about why Creating a Winning Culture Matters

Published in Skyways Insight Magazine – August 2016

Performance Management Faces Major Paradox

/in , , ,

Gone are the days of performance reviews. Dave Ulrich explains to Alan Hosking from HR Future how companies can resolve the performance management paradox by clarifying expectations, defining consequences, establishing metrics and standards, and bringing it all together through conversation. In what way is the thinking on performance management changing? A senior leader at a company recently said, “We have done away with performance appraisal because it causes so many problems.”

Read More

 

It’s time we rethink HR in a radical way

/in , , ,

Gone are the days when HR was just about salaries and employee benefits.

Human Resources professionals, regularly report a common critical challenge: they feel and experience a lack of credibility from within their business organisations. This finding dovetails with the common perception that, for years, HR has been the ‘least sexy’ end of business, proffering roles that few business science graduates are interested in pursuing. Whilst HR teams have been tasked with attracting and retaining great talent for their organisations, they have themselves struggled to draw talent to their own backyard.

Yet, recent research shows that a transformation is underway. It’s time that we wipe the slate clean and rethink HR functions, careers and value in a radical way. What would you call HR if it wasn’t already known as Human Resources? How differently would leaders and managers meet their “people needs”? Would HR really just be a cost centre, or is there a different kind of value to be added and gleaned? What could your business do differently to address the challenges of people, culture, and performance?

Global human resources guru Professor Dave Ulrich has persuasively demonstrated that HR’s traditional role is a thing of the past. He believes that, going forward, the HR function will increasingly be measured on business value, not people processes and transactions. As customers both inside and outside of the business look to leadership to secure their investment, it is little surprise that human capital is fast finding its way to the balance sheet.

Five years ago, Ulrich embarked on a research project to identify which role within a typical C-suite structure would be best suited to take over from the CEO. Unexpectedly, the HR executive appeared to be the most suitable position to step up to CEO. At that time, however, few if any HR execs were considered as candidates. But five years on, things are changing. A new trend is emerging. The people agenda has finally hit the top job and, in the US in particular, HR execs are not only being shortlisted for CEO roles, but are actually being appointed too. Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors, for example, served as VP of HR for 18 months. Anne Mulcahy, CEO of Xerox for 8 years, previously ran the company’s HR operations for several years. Today, Chief Human Resource Officers often report directly to the CEO, serve as key advisors, and present regularly to the board. These HR hotshots are no longer filling a support or administrative function, but rather serving as the person who enables business strategy.

Interestingly, all these appointments have had line management experience, and usually experience in other functions too. The HR high-flyer who becomes CEO is not necessarily someone who has only ever been an HR specialist, but quite often more of a generalist who’s spent time in HR.

It’s clear that the time has come for HR to become a more integral part of the business: line and HR need to coalesce. We need to rethink the value of HR as a function, and link HR’s value to organisational performance. If you were to spend the next year securing line management experience for everyone in your HR team, what would you do, and what’s stopping you? In turn, the credibility that HR professionals in South Africa still lack will evolve, not only from their ability to consistently deliver, but because their deliverables will be perceived as strategic and valuable. Furthermore, HR departments will be better positioned to foster a pipeline of dynamic, inspirational, influential leaders for future top jobs.

Nicola Tyler is CEO of Business Results Group, and will be on stage with Professor Dave Ulrich during his two one-day events, in both Jo’burg and Cape Town, on The Future Value of HR, hosted by Business Results Group and the Gordon Institute of Business Science. For more information visit www.brg.co.za/events

31348 - Dave Ulrich 2016 - Mailchimp Banner 1B - 350 x 125 pixels

Listen to Dave Ulrich on the Business of Business podcast

/in , ,

In his latest podcast, Chris Gibbons talks to Dave Ulrich, the world’s most sought after researcher, academic and business advisor in the field of human resources, human capital and leadership.

The conversation starts with the question: “Does HR really add value to an organisation, specifically its customers and shareholders? And if so, why do many people within an organisation still view the HR function in such a negative light?”

Don’t miss the opportunity to see Dave Ulrich live in South Africa, hosted in Cape Town and Johannesburg by Business Results Group and the Gordon Institute of Business Science. Reserve your seat today.

Listen to the podcast here

 

HR Capability Development Programmes

/in ,

In 2015 Business Results Group sponsored South Africa’s participation in Prof. Dave Ulrich’s Global Research project to identify the core capabilities required for the HR Professional of the future. The results of this research have not only underpinned Dave’s latest HR Capability Model, but for the first time in history South Africa’s contribution played a significant role with our participation ranking 3rd in the world, behind China and the USA.

The research has unveiled the 8 core competencies that will underpin the future capability and credibility of HR, a function that is increasingly challenged by paradox and required to be a trusted advisor to boards, leaders and the business. The impact of people is evident on the bottom line, and HR as a function is now playing a pivotal role in determining business value.

Development programmes for each core capability have been designed and are exclusively available in South Africa under the auspices of Business Results Group.

As a leader and HR Professional, you now have access to a series of 2-day workshops, each one targeting a specific area of your professional development. In partnership with IPM, members will also receive 2 CPD points for each day of training, and participants completing more than 5 programmes will not only qualify for a discount but will also be issued with an International Certificate of Completion issued by The RBL Group in the United States.

Click here to find out more and to reserve your seat.

Employee Engagement Gap

/in


Dr. Caren ScheepersEmployee Engagement

“Imagine a time when you were highly absorbed and engaged at work. What were the circumstances that caused this attentiveness and engagement? What did you feel at the time, what did you see, what did you hear and what did you smell? Make that experience vivid in your mind. Let your body actually experience the feeling now.” This is an exercise that I regularly start off with when I facilitate workshops on the topic “Employee Engagement”. As you read this article you are welcome to participate. You can even partake in the next exercise, by asking a colleague to work with you.

“Now choose a partner to work with and show your partner how you literally step into those circumstances and personal experience. What your partner then needs to do is to notice attentively what you look like, sound like, your body posture and your facial expression. The next step is to mimic it so that you can see clearly how your posture for instance changes when you are truly engaged or in the zone”. You have to take turns in this exercise, obviously. It has an added benefit of practice how to “tune in” to where other people are at by mimicking their non-verbal behaviour. Consequently, it allows us to become aware of how others feel and as a result build rapport with them. The question to discuss then is, “When last have you felt this invigorated at work?” and a follow up question, “How big is the gap between what you experience when you are fully engaged and your current work circumstances?”

Having observed numerous of these exercises, I realised that it is clear when employees are engaged and that it is actually quite contagious. Other observations were that the more upright body postures generally brought positive energy into the room and lasted long after the exercise. Neuropsychology explains this phenomenon by biochemical neurotransmitters in our brains that are activated by the imaginary incident, which also explains why we would feel fearful of circumstances that have not yet taken place (Scheepers & Jooste, 2012).

Tuning into our own awareness of being engaged or withdrawn as well as to others’ experiences, teaches us intuitively what engagement is about. Employee engagement is topical currently and mostly practitioners have been writing about this phenomenon. Lately, it luckily also grabbed the interest of academia that quite frankly wanted to find out whether employee engagement was only the latest “fad of the month”. Empirical studies followed that were published in top tier journals. For instance, the seminal work of Saks (2006) on the antecedents and consequences of employee engagement has academic rigour and provides scientific evidence for what we regularly experience intuitively in our daily work lives.

Nonetheless, mainly two exponents provided the theoretical foundation for employee engagement. Kahn (1990, p.694) defined it as ”employing themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally…in varying degrees.” In turn, Maslach (2001) who conducted more than 30 years of research, contrasted engagement with burnout, another phenomenon that we often come across in our highly stressful modern work environments. Her research revealed that burnout was the opposite of being engaged and the face validity of her study is high when we consider that vigour and dedication constitute engagement, whereas exhaustion, cynicism and withdrawal illustrate the opposite. Later research of Schaufeli et al (2002) confirmed Maslach’s notion of engagement and burnout being antipodes.

You might ask whether engagement is similar to commitment. Robinson et al (2004) pointed out in this regard, that engagement is more than commitment and more than an attitude. It is rather the degree to which an employee is attentive and absorbed in their work. Saks’ (2006) research provided evidence that commitment is actually a consequence of engagement. Furthermore, we can differentiate between job and organisational engagement. As a result, this article will focus on these two aspects.

a)         Job engagement 

Some people are highly engaged with their organisations, whereas others are actually engaged with their discipline or type of work and do not care where they conduct this job. These employees find meaning in the content of their work. Interestingly, job engagement increases when people have more contact with the beneficiaries of their work (Grant, 2012). Consequently, organisations must make a concerted effort to get back-office employees in contact with external or internal customers who are impacted by the quality of their work or lack thereof.

For the last 7 years, I have been lecturing on the GIBS MBA Module: Organisational Development and Transformation and I regularly asked these students whether they experience quality of work life. Sadly, over the years few of the MBA’s could declare that they were experiencing quality of work life. We often discussed Hackman and Oldham’s (1980) recommendations of bringing more of themselves into their work or being more engaged by: ensuring jobs are challenging, having variety, conducting significant tasks, allowing for personal discretion and making an important contribution. These students reported that getting feedback on their performance also increased meaningfulness of their jobs.

An interesting theory that could be associated with job engagement is the Social Exchange Theory or (SET) that implies that employees, who are provided with challenging and enriched jobs, feel obliged to reciprocate by responding with higher levels of engagement (Saks, 2006). On the other hand, when employees do not feel supported by colleagues or they do not get appropriate recognition and rewards, it leads to the burnout syndrome (Maslach et al, 2001). Kahn’s (1990) research revealed that our careers could constitute a series of leaps of engagement and falls of disengagement as well as that the person-role dynamics are complex.

b)         Organisational engagement 

Schaufeli and Bakker (2004) found that engaged employees have a greater attachment to their organisation. As a result, they have a lower intention to quit. Furthermore, they are involved in extra-role behaviour or being good organisational citizens and contribute to the greater organisation and not only to their own department or division.

I found it disappointing that in contrast, numerous executives on Senior Management Programmes found it difficult to articulate the social value that their organisations were creating and rather focused on financial results, whereas without financial results the organisation would anyway not be able to sustain itself. Nonetheless, through firstly meeting human needs by producing products or delivering services, organisations are able to declare financial returns and sustain the business. To the contrary, luckily organisations in South Africa like Nedbank, Woolworths, Nampak and FNB utilize corporate social responsibility projects as team building exercises and to build pride in their organisation’s contribution to society and subsequently organisational engagement.

Perceived procedural justice or fairness with regards to distribution of resources also influences organisational engagement (Rhoades et al, 2001). Conversely, a lack of fairness can exacerbate burnout (Maslach et al, 2001). Another dimension to consider is the Psychological Contract (Rousseau, 2004) with the resultant two-way relationship where employees receive economic and socio-emotional resources from the organisation and they respond in kind and repay the organisation by being psychologically present or engaged. We found in a specific study around this psychological contract that the human resources practice that had the most important relationship with the relational contract was training and development (Scheepers & Shuping, 2011). Consequently, investing in employees’ development would result in them perceiving that they are important to the organisation and they would reciprocate with loyalty to the organisation.

In closing, it is important to note that in the USA the engagement gap or lost of productivity cost due to employees being disengaged is estimated at $300 billion per annum (Kowalski, 2003). We do not have South African statistics to report however, the engagement gap remains an important phenomenon to investigate and I invite more researchers to conduct qualitative and quantitative studies to provide scientific evidence of the antecedents and consequences of employee engagement.

Follow Dave Ulrich on twitter: @dave_ulrich

References: 

  • Grant, A. M. (2012). Leading with meaning: Beneficiary contact, prosocial impact, and the performance effects of transformational leadership, Academy of Management Journal, 55 (2), 458-476.
  • Hackman, J. R. & Oldham, G. R. (1980). Work Redesign, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.
  • Kahn, W. A. (1990). Psychological conditions of personal engagement and disengagement at work, Academy of Management Journal, 33 (4), 692-724.
  • Kowalski, B. (2003). The Engagement Gap, Training, 40 (4), 62, as cited in Saks, A. M. (2006). Antecedents and consequences of employee engagement. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 21 (7), 600-619.
  • Maslach,C., Schaufelli, W. B. & Leiter, M. P. (2001). Job Burnout. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 397-422.
  • Rhoades, L., Eisenberger, R. & Armeli, S. (2001). Affective commitment to the organisation: the contribution of perceived organisational support, Journal of Applied Psychology, 86, 825-836.
  • Rousseau, D. M. (2004). Psychological contracts in the workplace: Understanding the ties that motivate, Academy of Management Executive, 18(1), 120-127.
  • Saks, A. M. (2006). Antecedents and consequences of employee engagement. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 21 (7), 600-619.
  • Schaufeli, W. B., Salanova, M., Gonzalez-Roma, V. & Bakker, A.B. (2002). The measurement of engagement and burnout: a two sample confirmatory factor analysis approach, Journal of Happiness Studies, 3 (3), 71-92.
  • Schaufeli, W. B & Baker, A. B. (2004). Job demands, job resources, and their relationship with burnout and engagement: a multi-sample study, Journal of Organisational Behaviour, 25, 293-315.
  • Scheepers, C. B. & Jooste, M. (2012). Neuroleadership informs internal business coaches on change, COMENSANews, Nov 30.
  • Scheepers, C. B. & Shuping, J. G. (2011). The effect of human resource practices on the psychological contract at an iron ore mining company in South Africa. South Africa Journal of Human Resources Management, 9(1), 1-19.