by Peter Hunter

     This article was originally published in The Productivity Institute (PI) Newsletter

If we want to get a teenager to clean their room our first instinct is to tell them to do it.
They are children, we are adults. It is our function to prepare them for life and part of that preparation includes telling them what to do, because we know best.

Yet how often when teenagers are told to clean their rooms do they actually do it?

Unless there is a very heavy threat attached to the order the chance of any teenager actually cleaning their room is practically zero.  We know this because we ourselves never used to clean our rooms and, based on the evidence of our own eyes, neither do our offspring.

So why, when we are faced with overwhelming data demonstrating the utter futility of telling our teenagers to clean their rooms, do we still persist in creating pointless conflict by telling them to do things that we know they never will.

At least we are right about one thing.

Telling teenagers what to do does prepare them for life because when they find a job they will discover that their managers will spend most of their time creating pointless conflict by telling them what to do.

Their managers, whether the object of their own teenagers antipathy or not, are unlikely to have understood that what makes a teenager resist being told what to do also holds true for the rest of the population.

Their managers will continue telling the workforce what to do believing that it is only as a result of this constant instruction that anything is done at all, not realising for a minute that by telling their workforce what to do the manager causes them to react in exactly the same way that the teenagers do when told to clean their rooms.

Telling people what to do actually destroys their ability to do it.

People enjoy challenges; we enjoy achieving our goals and being proud of what we have done.

What we hate is being told what to do.

So when we are told what to do we resist, not because we object to what we have been told to do, the resistance occurs because we object to being “told” what to do.

If management set a target for the workforce, it appears to the workforce as an arbitrary statement, not based in reality, telling them what management think that they should be doing.

Management is essentially telling the workforce what they should be doing and the workforce react against their desire for control by seldom, if ever, achieving the management set target.

The workforce are accustomed to management setting unachievable targets and management are accustomed to the workforce failing to achieve their targets, never once doubting that the failure is the fault of the workforce and never suspecting for a minute that it is the fault of management for setting the target in the first place.

By setting the target management almost guarantee its non achievement.

Catch 22
By setting targets, by telling people what to do, we are actually creating the conditions that prevent them from achieving the very thing that we have instructed them to do.

How then can we get people to do what we want if we cannot tell them what to do?

Consider the teenager, they do not want to live in unsanitary squalor,  but they are forced to do it by being continually being told to clean their rooms.

In the same way the workforce do not want to be perceived as unmotivated failures but this is what they are forced to be in reaction to the attempts of management to exert control.

The problem is “telling” people what to do.

If instead of telling other people what to do, we listen to what they want, we can then help them to achieve something.

The “something” that is achieved may not be exactly what we wanted but it will be an achievement that everybody can take pride in.

It will be orders of magnitude better than the destructive resistance that is created every time we try to get our own way by telling other people what we think they should be doing.

If you have ever experienced or learnt something which you then knew was instinctively right - you will never have forgotten it. Peter Hunter learned something years ago which, regrettably, most of us have still yet to learn. When we do - once we have understood the simplicity of ‘Breaking the Mould’ - it will transform our lives forever! Vic Baxter – Business Workout. Peter Hunter: Author-Breaking the Mould.www.BreakingTheMould.Co.UK

   by Greg Chartier, Ph.D., SPHR

 

This article was published in The Productivity Institute newsletter

 

Management cares about results.  Historically, however, human resources has not understood nor attempted to understand what results were important.   Two measures are most common, effectiveness and efficiency.  I think we begin with efficiency. 

 

Efficiency is a ratio of inputs and outputs; you put resources in and get results out.  If you can decrease the inputs and increase the outputs, you are more efficient.  Efficiency also allows you to spend more resources, assuming that the outputs will increase in a greater ratio than those inputs.

 

One of the difficulties in using the term “efficiency” is that we have multiple definitions for it.  I will use efficiency to mean, “How much does a given expenditure on human resources produce in programs or practices?”

 

For HR people that means, what level of human resource programs (training, compensation, staffing, communications ,etc.) is generated for a given investment of

resources (such as time and money)?

 

Every business uses some sort of metrics or management index to determine “how we are doing.”  When business people talk about a company or the health of the economy or an industry, they almost always use some sort of measures to refer to.  What is valuable about indexes is they serve as a barometer for the overall health of the system we are measuring.

 

If the other departments have indexes, then Human Resources should have them, as well.  I have always felt that the principal measure of the HR department has been staffing.  It is the most obvious of our functions and the one that affects every manager.  So , a staffing index is a good place to start.  A staffing index will tell us how the staffing function is doing and, more importantly, give us some conversation points for our Senior Management.

 

Most of us already use some measures, particularly in the staffing area.  We talk about “time to fill” or recruiting costs per placement or turnover ratio.  These are good but they create a mindset that focuses only on lowest cost or fastest delivery.  This is not efficiency.

 

I have several different types of measures that I would like to introduce, all of which can add value to your organization.  Let’s start with Revenue per Employee.  Rather than focus on headcount, we should look at how much revenue each employee brings into the firm.  Headcount doesn’t mean much if they are contributing to the success of the organization by either bringing in money or reducing outlay of money.

 

Now, we need to look at the staffing function, just to collect some data we will need later.

 

Cost Per Hire.  This is not only the direct cost of advertising and agency fees.  I would include several other items:

 

Source Costs = Advertising and agency fees as well as referral bonuses.  There are four

costs:  advertisements, agency fees, employee referrals and no cost walk

 ins.

 

Staff Time = salary, benefits and overhead for the recruiting staff. 

 

Manager Time = Salary, benefits and overhead for the hiring manager

 

Processing Cost = Employee references, physicals, drug tests, payroll set up, other

      employment costs

 

Miscellaneous = New Employee Orientation, and any unplanned expenses.

 

 

            CPH =  SC + ST + MT + 10%

                                    N

 

            SC = Source Cost (Advertising expense + Agency fees + Employee Referrals)

            ST =  Recruiting staff time

           MT =  Manager time

          10% = Miscellaneous

 

New Hire Performance.  While it’s great to fill our positions, the true measure of our effectiveness as recruiters is the quality of the people we hire.  In this case, the new employee is the product of our recruitment efforts and we must be held accountable for at least a portion of the success of the new employee.

 

Quality is a difficult concept to apply to human resources but I think we can admit two things: 

 

The new employee must perform, on the job, over a period of time, in order to be considered “successful.”  I would suggest a six month review of new hire performance, compared to the performance averages for the company as a whole.  There must be some return on the investment we made on the new employee.  This means, to me, that they need to stay with the organization (voluntarily) in order to demonstrate success.

 

With these two items in mind, we can measure New Hire Performance:

 

 

            NHP = PR + HP + HS

                                    N

 

            NHP = New Hire Performance

             PR   = Average job performance rating of the new employee

             HP   = Percentage of new hires promoted within one year

             HS   = Percentage of new hires retained after one year

              N    = Number of new employees hired during the evaluation period

 

                                    NHP = 60 + 20+ 90       = 1.7%

                                                        100

 

This is a relative value and it means what you want it to mean.  The evaluation only becomes valuable over time as you compare period to period.  It can be valuable to compare different departments, over time, as well.

 

 

            Greg Chartier is Principal of The Office of Gregory J Chartier, a Human Resources Consulting firm and is a well-known management consultant, educator and speaker.  His practice consists of two broad areas:  Human Resources management and outsourcing for firms of less than 100 employees and Management Training. His business experience includes management positions with Pfizer, The Chase Manhattan Bank, The Bank of New York and Johnson and Johnson.  Greg is a Board Member of the Business Council of Westchester and the Chair of the Human Resources Council.  He is also a Board Member of the Job Service Employers Council (JSEC) of the New York State Department of Labor.  Greg can be reached at greg.chartier@att.net and by phone at 914-548-1689.