Tag: management

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Earlier this year IBM told remote employees they must return to the office or leave the company.

It’s a turnaround. IBM pioneered allowing employees to work from home. At times as many as more than a third of the firm’s staff worked at places away from company offices.

The company often lectures others on the merits of remote work. Company marketing describes telework as the future. Moreover, IBM sells products enabling its customers to offer remote work to their employees.

IBM’s remote work policy was popular with staff. Many talented people either opted to join the company or decided to stay put because they could work from home. It’s powerful for working women with families and just as good for dads who like to see their children more often.

Productivity or IBM’s staff costs?

The official reason for the change is that working together in one place helps productivity, teamwork and morale.

There’s something in this. Collaboration is easier when co-workers sit across the aisle. Video conference calls are productive, but so are well organised face-to-face sessions. Chance meetings at the coffee station can spark fresh thinking.

Yet, you can’t help wonder if IBM’s move is about cutting staff numbers. Many remote workers may decide it is too hard to move home in order to keep their job. Some of the office demands mean people have to move long distances to keep their jobs.

There’s research, some sponsored by IBM, showing teleworkers are more productive than office-bound workers. Which argument are we supposed to believe? Can we trust anything the company says on the subject?

Ominous

Yahoo made a similar back-to-the-office move. It was unpopular. Many talented staff members quit. We all know how well that story ended.

There’s a practical problem for IBM workers in places like New Zealand. Some specialist roles are shared with Australia. There are ANZ managers are in New Zealand, others across the Tasman. They shuttle between locations and make a lot of conference calls. What happens to them under the new rules? The fear is they will be under pressure to move closer to the regional HQ in Sydney. That will not go down well with New Zealand customers.

Remote working became popular with large companies about a decade ago as suburban broadband improved. Video conferencing went from being difficult to practical.

Senior managers across the technology and other industries loved the idea of remote work as they thought it would save costs. In theory, offices needed less real estate and fewer support services when workers were elsewhere.

Things didn’t work out that way. Few savings materialised.The other part of this equation is that management went through a stage of being output-focused. That is, they were more concerned with what employees produced than in keeping close tabs on them all day long. If someone produced a report in their pyjamas or by sitting next to the pool that wasn’t a problem so long as the work was good. It seems the pendulum has swung back to command and control.

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Harvey Norman

Radio New Zealand reports Harvey Norman shoppers ‘may have a case’:

Rainey Collins Lawyers managing partner Alan Knowsley said if the customers did not agree to the terms and conditions they may have a case.

“They could go off to the Disputes Tribunal and seek to enforce their contract and then Harvey Norman will have to prove that the person should have known the deal was too good to be true,” Mr Knowsley said.

“Some retailers obviously advertise regularly that things are 60-80 percent off and that sort of retailer would be really hard pushed to prove that that deal wasn’t valid.”

According to the company a technical glitch on its website meant furniture and other items were sold at prices way below their nominal value. That’s exactly what consumers have been trained to expect in ‘sales’.

Now Harvey Norman doesn’t want to honour customer contracts. Imagine how that would work if the boot was on the other foot.

This case confirms what many already suspect: that the Australian-owned chain operates in poor faith. Apart from the legality and immorality of offering goods at low prices, taking money, forming contracts and then not delivering, this sends a loud “not trustworthy” message to the market.

If Harvey Norman decided to honour those glitch contracts in full it may have lost a tidy sum of money but there would be no long-term damage. Now it faces the possibility of those losses anyway, plus legal costs, ill will and negative publicity.

That’s bad business practice and awful management.

... and yet NZ retailers still wonder why shoppers head to overseas stores on the internet. 

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There comes a time in every manager’s life when a junior oversteps the mark.

If the offence is too serious to go unnoticed, yet not bad enough to crank up formal discipline, you need to have words with the person.

How you handle this will have a long-term impact on your relationship with the junior – it can also have a wider impact on how you interact with the rest of your colleagues.

Take care not to alienate

Aim to deliver a powerful, unambiguous message reinforcing good behaviour while correcting or halting bad behaviour. You need to do this without alienating or demotivating the junior.

What’s more, you need to do it within the context of company policy and employment law. Balancing these forces requires a subtle approach and a workable game plan.

It only takes a minute

The One Minute Manager suggests a useful basic template for disciplining subordinates.

Although the book’s corny approach borders on the embarrassing, Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson offer useful advice on administering day-to-day management discipline.

The “One Minute Warning” goes like this:

  • Keep the carpeting short – there’s a reason we call it the one minute warning,
  • Check with the person concerned that you have the story straight before saying anything more,
  • Quickly reprimand the behaviour, not the person,
  • Let them know exactly how you feel about the incident,
  • Pause while this sinks in and then…
  • Praise the person and remind them of their strengths.

Beyond the basics

While this is a good basic template, it doesn’t always work.

The One Minute Manager was written for Americans. They take certain workplace ideas as understood, these don’t necessary translate into other cultures.

Workers in New Zealand and Australia are generally stroppier than their US counterparts, are more argumentative. We have been conditioned for better or worse by a more confrontational industrial climate.

One Minute Bollocking

In the early 1980s, a British friend of mine refined this technique, which she described as a “One Minute Bollocking“. The difference being at the time Pom employees were less susceptible to the kind of empty flattery that goes down well with Americans.

She followed the Blanchard and Johnson recipe up to the last step where she simply told the person that this wouldn’t affect their career prospects and that she knew they were capable of delivering the goods: “Now get out and get on with your work”.

Although British employees are often more deferential than their antipodian counterparts, I’ve found, depending on the motivational needs of the person in question, the British style bollocking generally goes down better than the saccharine ‘warning’.

Jim Sinegal is the boss at the US Costco chain. Costco’s stock price has doubled while he has been in charge.

Apparently:

  • Sinegal’s name tag just says ‘Jim’.
  • He answers his own phone.
  • His headquarters office doesn’t have walls.
  • He earns an annual salary of US$350,00. He reckons he should not be paid more than 12 normal company workers.
  • He has a one page contract which says he can be sacked if doesn’t do his work.
  • His employee turnover rate is the lowest in the retail industry, over five times less than rival Wal-Mart.

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Keeping workers motivated when a company goes through business change is challenging. There are many factors to juggle. Tinkering in one area may unbalance matters elsewhere. Workers worry about losing control during change.

And then there’s uncertainty.

Each person has an uncertainty threshold. Your threshold may be high; someone else may have a lower threshold. When extra uncertainty pushes people above their threshold, they feel uncomfortable.

Most workers – particularly knowledge workers – take everyday uncertainty in their stride. External events, like terrorist attacks or economic downturn lift background uncertainty levels. They reduce people’s capacity to deal with workplace uncertainty. Yet most workers cope well during normal times.

Instability kills motivation

What we once knew as normal times are now fewer and further between. Even so, when a business goes through change, uncertainty levels rise. You can rest assured change will push a lot of people over their uncertainty threshold. And that hurts their motivation.

The first reaction of workers pushed over the uncertainty threshold is to redress the balance. They look for certainty. This is understandable. What happens next is a simple knee jerk reaction to resist further change.

Harvard professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter calls this the “Walking off a cliff blindfolded problem”. She says for many people change looks too dangerous. They prefer to stay with the devil they know than commit to the devil they don’t know.

Worker communication

Good managers have no trouble understanding how to deal with this problem. They open lines of communication to the workforce to articulate the plans for change.

Large organisations hire communications professionals or even PR companies to help. I’ve seen staff meetings, PowerPoint presentations, company newsletters, glossy magazines and fancy videos used. Twenty years ago I edited a weekly tabloid newspaper designed to sell a corporate change programme to employees. I know how this from the inside.

Communications can fall flat for three reasons.

  1. No amount of spin can sugar a frightening message. If an organisation plans layoffs – words won’t help. People aren’t stupid – that’s why you hired them.They recognise official flim-flam when they see it. Anyone with sense will either be preparing their own escape route or doing all they can to stall the change which will destroy their job. All this changes their motivation from helping the company to, in some cases, hurting it.
  2. Internal company propaganda lacks credibility. Many of us have worked in corporations where, if the management message is “don’t worry your job is safe” know the real story is sackings are coming.It is about trust. It is also about common sense – if you work for a company that hypes its products to customers, you might well be wary of internal communications.
    Another credibility point is corporate propaganda often sells the benefits of change, not outlines the process. Employees need information – this is distinct from the material most companies produce.People want to know exactly what will happen: which departments will close, which jobs move to Tasmania, who gets another role and so on. Feeding them motherhood statements might make you feel important, nobody else will fall for it.
  3. Communication fails when senior managers forget it is a two-way street. There’s little point in articulating a vision if you don’t listen to people’s legitimate fears and deal with them.

The best way for senior managers to communicate is in person – even in a large organisation.

And it isn’t just about words, it is also about action. Leaders – remember that word? – lead from the front.

If there’s a cliff to leap off, workers will be much more willing to leap if they are following their managers.