My January round-up, slightly closer to being on time than December’s. This month is focused on Culture, Strategy, and the importance of measuring happiness. I’ve summarized the articles for all the other busy HR professionals out there. This month’s articles are:
- Forbes – Measuring Happiness (Bain & Co)
- Fast Company – Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch
- McKinsey Quarterly – Just-in-time-strategy For a Turbulent World
Forbes – Measuring Happiness (Bain & Co)
Intro: The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is as a measure and framework to make people happy they recommend a product or company to friends and loved ones so they can benefit from a similar experience. This helps hard-minded business execs, look at the very real connection between how customers feel about their experience with a company and that company’s profitable, sustainable growth.
Summary:
- Bain & Company finds it nearly impossible to separate employee happiness and customer happiness—they are two sides of the same coin.
- While companies already have well-advanced measures to focus efforts on profits they lacked a rigorous metric for happiness—until NPS
- Leaders need to treat their employees well, but employee happiness comes from meaningful service to clients.
- Bosses can make sure their people are in a position to earn lots of 10s from their customers—by structuring teams correctly, assigning good leaders, providing the right tools and training, supporting them with good policies and putting individuals in roles that play to their strengths.
- Equally important is a system that measures the impact employees have on customers and lets employees hear that feedback in a timely manner.
- Integrating the customer NPS and employee NPS are the key to building a cycle of improving loyalty (of both employees and customers)
Full Article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/baininsights/2012/01/25/measuring-happiness/2/
Fast Company – Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch
Intro: Get on a Southwest flight to anywhere, buy shoes from Zappos.com, pants from Nordstrom, groceries from Whole Foods, anything from Costco, a Starbucks espresso, or a Double-Double from In N’ Out, and you’ll get a taste of these brands’ vibrant cultures.
Summary:
- Culture, like brand, is misunderstood and often discounted as a touchy-feely component of business that belongs to HR, when it is really a driver of long-term success.
- Ignoring the health of your culture is like letting aquarium water get dirty.
- Culture drives: Focus, Motivation, Connection, Cohesion, and Spirit (employee behaviour)
- Four key elements to building a strong culture:
- Engaged leadership: Executives need to care about their organization and clearly communicate their vision, mission, values, and goals.
- Live Your Values: Screen for candidates with your values and test to see if people actually believe in them (my instinct says unlikely in most organizations).
- Clear Responsibility and accountability: Results based performance management – not process.
- Celebrate success and failures: Both large and small
Full Article: http://www.fastcompany.com/1810674/culture-eats-strategy-for-lunch
McKinsey Quarterly – Just-in-time strategy for a turbulent world
Intro: Uncertainty and rising levels of risk make it impossible for companies to determine the future. But a portfolio-of-initiatives approach to strategy can help ensure that companies take full advantage of their best opportunities without taking unnecessary risks.
Summary:
- Gone are the days of stagnant top down “strategy” dictated from atop every few years, the modern world requires strategy to be aligned to a fluid external environment.
- Consider the problem of moving supplies and ships across the Pacific Ocean during World War II.
- Controlling the weather in the Pacific was beyond control but that risks could be minimized with schedules based on weather patterns.
- The real challenge was consider the enemies plans. The answer was to deploy convoys with a mix of war and supply ships, which had a “portfolio effect,” with sufficient supplies arriving even when some ships didn’t.
- Corporate strategy as a “portfolio of initiatives” aimed at achieving favorable outcomes for the entire enterprise, organized by themes (i.e. increasing global, entering a new but related industry, or lowering cost of production). Portfolio effects increase the likelihood that some of these aspirations will be achieved even if many others fail.
- Creating an ever changing portfolio (10-20 initiatives) of smaller bets ($10-$30 million), with those with the most promise being selected as major initiatives. This also means a willingness to end initiatives based on the evidence obtained while testing them.
- To manage this it means having a disciplined process for testing initiatives, strong analytics and a way to compare initiatives (see full article)
- My Note: In my experience HR shops tend to “perfect and polish” programs before rolling them out. This may mean only 3-4 initiatives in a given year. This fluid approach could mean having independent HR consultants running 3-4 initiatives each with small groups in the organization, and then as a group evaluating which were the most effective warranting further development and an organizational roll-out.
Full Article: https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Strategy/Strategic_Thinking/Just-in-time_strategy_for_a_turbulent_world_1195
As always, I hope one or two of these jumps out at you as something to read further into. And as always, feel free to let me know what you’re reading (it may end up here next month).
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