Posts tagged as:

employee engagement

When Employee Branding Hurts

by cv harquail on June 8, 2009

Employee Branding, done well, can be a great tool for the organization. The organization gets employees to behave in ways that are aligned with the organization’s desired brand message, and employees get a sense of connection to the brand and what it stands for, as well as a little bit of empowerment for making these promises more of a reality.

200906081206.jpg However, there are times when even the most carefully conceived and respectfully executed employee branding problems end up hurting the employees. In particular, employee branding can end up hurting an employee when the employee-organization relationship ends.

When employees end the relationship themselves, it can be difficult to say goodbye to a meaningful connection and to let go of that sense of themselves that was crafted through all those employee branding activities. However, when employees leave on their own, it is often to take on another role (at another organization or not) where their desire to be connected and to have a meaningful relationship with their work environment can be filled in the new way.

But woe to the “branded” employee whose separation from the organization is not voluntary.

We know that a lot of these involuntary separations have occurred (just look at the data on layoffs). For a large proportion of these employees, their relationships with their organizations were not ended because the employee’s performance was bad or because he or she no longer cared about the organization’s goals. Rather, the relationships were ended by the organization, for the organization’s benefit.

An involuntary ending of the branded employee’s relationship with the organization is painful, because it can feel as though the organization is rejecting the employee even after all the employee has done to serve the organization- – even going so far as to change her priorities, her behavior, and her “self”-expression.

Employee branding hurt s when employees who have contributed their skills, their energy and especially their sense of self self to the organization are abruptly (and sometimes even blithely) dropped by their organizations. (This is one of the reasons I dislike how quickly organizations resort to layoffs rather than alternatives.) At this moment, those “living the brand” programs , certificates and coffee mugs are seen for what they too often are– tools of the machine.

Consider this excerpt from a fabulous blog by an ‘ex-employee’, IttyBityCrazy. Describing her day at the “outsourcing consultant”, she writes:

… my ex-employer has not simply hired an outplacement firm and let them take care of us at their facility. Nope. My ex-employer had set up a special office for its outcasts, manned by (the outplacement agency) staff. But everything other than the staff is from my ex-employer. The cube furniture, the equipment, the fridges with sodas, the snack machines, the coffee makers. The coffee cups have my ex-employer’s branding on them! Way to help us move on!

(So the way this outplacement experience will work is:) I can drive for forty minutes, walk the silent corridors, sit in a soulless cube and, when I can’t stand that anymore, I can meet someone in the kitchen and, both holding our ex-employer-branded coffee cups, we can chat about the good old days. And about how we’re moving on up and moving on out. How it’s time to break free, and nothing can stop us.

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After I let IttyBittyCrazy’s writing sink in, I imagined this ex-employee (who elsewhere describes many great things about her (former) organization/ job) standing there in the kitchenette. Struggling to find some hope after having been told that she must “let go”.

But what have they given her to hold on to? One of the very tools that her organizations used to bring her in more closely.

How’s that for a contradiction?

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An Agenda for Management Innovation: 25 Challenges

by cv harquail on January 27, 2009

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1. Ensure that management’s work serves a higher purpose.
Management, both in theory and practice, must orient itself to the achievement of noble, socially significant goals.

2. Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems.
There’s a need for processes and practices that reflect the interdependence of all stakeholder groups.

3. Reconstruct management’s philosophical foundations.
To build organizations that are more than merely efficient, we will need to draw lessons from such fields as biology, markets, democracies, and theology.

4. Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy.
There are advantages to natural hierarchies, where power flows up from the bottom and leaders emerge instead of being appointed.

5. Reduce fear and increase trust.
Mistrust and fear are toxic to innovation and engagement and must be wrung out of tomorrow’s management systems.

6. Reinvent the means of control.
To transcend the discipline-versus-freedom trade-off, control systems will have to encourage control from within, rather than constraints from without.

7. Redefine the work of leadership.
The notion of “the” leader as a heroic decision maker is untenable. Leaders must be recast as social-systems architects who work to enable innovation and collaboration.

8. Expand and exploit diversity.
We must create a management system that values diversity, disagreement, and divergence as much as conformance, consensus, and cohesion.

9. Reinvent strategy making as an emergent process.
In a turbulent world, strategy making must reflect the biological principles of variety, selection, and retention.

10. De-structure and disaggregate the organization.
To become more adaptable and innovative, large entities must be disaggregated into smaller, more malleable units.

11. Dramatically reduce the pull of the past.
Existing management systems often mindlessly reinforce the status quo. In the future, they must facilitate innovation and change.

12. Share the work of setting direction.
To engender commitment, the responsibility for goal setting must be distributed in a process where share of voice is a function of insight, not power.

13. Develop holistic performance measures.
Existing performance metrics must be recast because they give inadequate attention to the critical human capabilities that drive success in the creative economy.

14. Stretch executives’ timeframes and perspectives.
Discover alternatives to compensation and reward systems that encourage managers to sacrifice long-term goals for short-term gains.

15. Create a democracy of information.
Companies need holographic information systems that equip every employee to act in the interests of the entire enterprise.

16. Empower renegades and disarm reactionaries.
Management systems must give more power to employees who have their emotional equity invested in the future rather than in the past.

17. Expand the scope of employee autonomy.
Management systems must be redesigned to facilitate grassroots initiatives and local experimentation.

18. Create internal markets for ideas, talent, and resources.
Markets are better than hierarchies are at allocating resources, and companies’ resource allocation processes need to reflect this fact.

19. Depoliticize decision making.
 Decision-processes must be free of positional biases and exploit the collective wisdom of the entire organization.

20. Better optimize trade-offs.
Management systems tend to force either-or choices. What’s needed are hybrid systems that subtly optimize key trade-offs.

21. Further unleash human imagination.
Much is known about what engenders human creativity. This knowledge must be better applied in the design of management systems.

22. Enable communities of passion.
To maximize employee engagement, management systems must facilitate the formation of communities of passion.

23. Retool management for an open world.
Value-creating networks often transcend the firm’s boundaries and can render traditional power-based management tools ineffective. New management tools are needed to build complex ecosystems.

24. Humanize the language and practice of business.
Tomorrow’s management systems must give as much credence to timeless human ideals such as beauty, justice and community as they do to the traditional goals of efficiency, advantage, and profit.

25. Retrain managerial minds.
Managers’ traditional deductive and analytical skills must be complemented by conceptual and systems-thinking skills.

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Alternatives to Layoffs: One Truth and Three Lies that keep organizations from trying

December 21, 2008

After weeks of reports of one organization’s layoffs after another (leaving me to wonder who in corporate America still has a secure job) comes a brighter bit of news – some organizations are trying to find alternatives to layoffs to manage the downturn in their economic prospects, according to The New York Times today [...]

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