Job sculpting: the art of retaining your best people

Hiring good people is tough, but keeping them can be even tougher. The professionals streaming out of today's MBA programs are so well educated and achievement oriented that they could do well in virtually any job. But will they stay? According to noted career experts Timothy Butler and James Waldroop, only if their jobs fit their deeply embedded life interests--that is, their long-held, emotionally driven passions. Butler and Waldroop identify the eight different life interests of people drawn to business careers and introduce the concept of job sculpting, the art of matching people to jobs that resonate with the activities that make them truly happy. Managers don't need special training to job sculpt, but they do need to listen more carefully when employees describe what they like and dislike about their jobs. Once managers and employees have discussed deeply embedded life interests--ideally, during employee performance reviews--they can work together to customize future work assignments. In some cases, that may mean simply adding another assignment to existing responsibilities. In other cases, it may require moving that employee to a new position altogether. Skills can be stretched in many directions, but if they are not going in the right direction--one that is congruent with deeply embedded life interests--employees are at risk of becoming dissatisfied and uncommitted. And in an economy where a company's most important asset is the knowledge, energy, and loyalty of its people, that's a large risk to take.     

The right way to be fired.

Nearly all of us will lose our jobs sometime, but is there a right way to be terminated? What differentiates fired employees who make the best of their situations from those who do not? One answer is mind-set. Many workers unconsciously hold a "tenure mind-set," believing in the promise of employment security. By contrast, other workers hold an "assignment mentality," seeing each job as one in a series of impermanent, career-building stepping-stones. Most corporate board members and CEOs have this latter mind-set and consider their executives to be filling terminal assignments; people who possess this mentality usually rebound swiftly when fired. But when employees who hold a tenure mind-set are suddenly fired or laid off, the authors say, they can fall into three common traps. Executives who have overidentified with their jobs and feel indispensable to their organizations get caught in the "lost identity" trap; they react to termination with anger and bitterness. In the "lost family" trap, employees possess tight-knit, emotional bonds with coworkers. When terminated, they feel betrayed and rejected. And finally, some introverted executives fall into the "lost ego" trap; they quietly retreat without negotiating fair termination packages and may settle for less satisfying work the next time around. To prepare for the eventuality of termination, the authors suggest that executives adopt the assignment mind-set at all times. They should keep their social networks alive, include a termination clause in employment contracts, and consider hiring an agent. If warning signs warrant, they might even volunteer to be terminated. By assuming control over the way they are fired, people can gain control over their careers.     

Why "good jobs" are good for retailers

Too many retail managers believe that they must offer bad jobs to keep prices low. As a result, almost one-fifth of American workers suffer low wages, poor benefits, constantly changing schedules, and few opportunitie for advancement. The author's research reveals, however, that the presumed trade-off between investment in employees and low prices is false. To meet short-term performance targets, many retailers cut labor. The unmotivated and poorly trained employees who remain often cannot keep up with their tasks in a complex operating environment. The result is a vicious cycle, in which lower sales and profits tempt managers to cut even more employees. Retailers such as QuikTrip, Mercadona, Trader Joe's, and Costco instead create a virtuous cycle of investment in employees, stellar operational execution, higher sales and profits, and larger labor budgets. They also make work more efficient and fulfilling for employees, improve customer service, and boost sales and profits through four practices: simplify operations by offering fewer products and promotions, train employees to perform multiple tasks, eliminate waste in everything but staffing, and let employees make some decisions.     

Fair process: managing in the knowledge economy

Unlike the traditional factors of production--land, labor, and capital--knowledge is a resource that can't be forced out of people. But creating and sharing knowledge is essential to fostering innovation, the key challenge of the knowledge-based economy. To create a climate in which employees volunteer their creativity and expertise, managers need to look beyond the traditional tools at their disposal. They need to build trust. The authors have studied the links between trust, idea sharing, and corporate performance for more than a decade. They have explored the question of why managers of local subsidiaries so often fail to share information with executives at headquarters. They have studied the dynamics of idea sharing in product development teams, joint ventures, supplier partnerships, and corporate transformations. They offer an explanation for why people resist change even when it would benefit them directly. In every case, the decisive factor was what the authors call fair process--fairness in the way a company makes and executes decisions. The elements of fair process are simple: Engage people's input in decisions that directly affect them. Explain why decisions are made the way they are. Make clear what will be expected of employees after the changes are made. Fair process may sound like a soft issue, but it is crucial to building trust and unlocking ideas. Without it, people are apt to withhold their full cooperation and their creativity. The results are costly: ideas that never see daylight and initiatives that are never seized.     

Managing Middlescence

They make up more than half your workforce. They work longer hours than anyone else in your company. From their ranks come most of your top managers. They're your midcareer employees, the solid citizens between the ages of 35 and 55 whom you bank on for their loyalty and commitment. And they're not happy. In fact, they're burned out, bored, and bottlenecked, new research reveals. Only 33% of the 7700 workers the authors surveyed feel energized by their work; 36% say they're in dead-end jobs. One in three is not satisfied with his or her job. One in five is looking for another. Welcome to middlescence. Like adolescence, it can be a time of frustration, confusion, and alienation. But it can also be a time of self-discovery, new direction, and fresh beginnings. Today, millions of midcareer men and women are wrestling with middlescence-looking for ways to balance work, family, and leisure while hoping to find new meaning in theirjobs. The question is, Will they find it in your organization or elsewhere? Companies are ill prepared to manage middlescence because it is so pervasive, largely invisible, and culturally uncharted. That neglect is bad for business: Many companies risk losing some of their best people or-even worse-ending up with an army of disaffected people who stay. The best way to engage middlescents is to tap into their hunger for renewal and help them launch into more meaningful roles. Perhaps managers can't grant a promotion to everyone who merits one in today's flat organizations, but you may be able to offer new training, fresh assignments, mentoring opportunities, even sabbaticals or entirely new career paths within your own company. Millions of midcareer men and women would like nothing better than to convert their restlessness into fresh energy. They just need the occasion-and perhaps a little assistance-to unleash and channel all that potential.     

The impact of health care reform on older workers, retirees and employers

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as amended by the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 impacts everyone who uses or pays for the health care system. Among the new law's effects will be changes in older workers' health care choices as they transition from full-time employees to part-time work or other jobs and, ultimately, to retirement, and the retiree health benefit choices facing their employers. This article reviews the major issues surrounding these changes, including those affecting retiree health benefits, benefits for Medicare-eligible retirees and health care options for older Americans not yet eligible for Medicare. The authors conclude that although employers will be reacting in 2010 and 2011 with regard to some issues surrounding FASB ASC 715-60 and the early retiree reinsurance program, employers should consider waiting to make major changes until regulations are issued and the health plans for active employees have been fully vetted.     

Changing employee values: deepening discontent?

This article presents a synthesis of data on employee attitudes gathered over the last 25 years. Most of the findings confirm the hypothesis that employees are discontented and expect more from their jobs now than they have in the past. While managerial satisfaction has remained relatively constant, the work satisfaction among hourly and clerical employees has sharply decreased. The authors attribute dissatisfaction to changes in the expectations and values of employees and warn that the deterioration of work attitudes may result in increased operating costs due to poor quality work, reduced output, absenteeism, etc. Instituting an employer attitude survey is suggested as a means of improving communication between management and employees and increasing job satisfaction.     

Financial Reporting and Employee Job Search

We investigate the effects of financial reporting on current employee job search, that is, whether firms' public financial reports cause their employees to reevaluate their jobs and consider leaving. We develop theory for why current employees use earnings announcements (EAs) to inform job search decisions, and empirically investigate job search based on employees' activity on a popular job market website. We find that job search by current employees increases significantly during EA weeks, especially when employees are more mobile and when their information frictions are greater. We also find that employees use EAs to update their expectations about their employers' economic prospects, consistent with learning, and some evidence that positive announcements elicit less search. Our paper contributes to the burgeoning labor and accounting literature by providing among the first evidence closely linking financial reports to employee learning and job search.     

How to kill creativity

In today's knowledge economy, creativity is more important than ever. But many companies unwittingly employ managerial practices that kill it. How? By crushing their employees' intrinsic motivation--the strong internal desire to do something based on interests and passions. Managers don't kill creativity on purpose. Yet in the pursuit of productivity, efficiency, and control--all worthy business imperatives--they undermine creativity. It doesn't have to be that way, says Teresa Amabile. Business imperatives can comfortably coexist with creativity. But managers will have to change their thinking first. Specifically, managers will need to understand that creativity has three parts: expertise, the ability to think flexibly and imaginatively, and motivation. Managers can influence the first two, but doing so is costly and slow. It would be far more effective to increase employees' intrinsic motivation. To that end, managers have five levers to pull: the amount of challenge they give employees, the degree of freedom they grant around process, the way they design work groups, the level of encouragement they give, and the nature of organizational support. Take challenge as an example. Intrinsic motivation is high when employees feel challenged but not overwhelmed by their work. The task for managers, therefore, becomes matching people to the right assignments. Consider also freedom. Intrinsic motivation--and thus creativity--soars when managers let people decide how to achieve goals, not what goals to achieve. Managers can make a difference when it comes to employee creativity. The result can be truly innovative companies in which creativity doesn't just survive but actually thrives.     

Extreme jobs: the dangerous allure of the 70-hour workweek

Today's overachieving professionals labor longer, take on more responsibility, and earn more than the workaholics of yore. They hold what Hewlett and Luce call "extreme jobs", which entail workweeks of 60 or more hours and have at least five often characteristics-such as tight deadlines and lots of travel--culled from the authors' research on this work model. A project of the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force, a private-sector initiative, this research consists of two large surveys (one of high earners across various professions in the United States and the other of high-earning managers in large multinational corporations) that map the shape and scope of such jobs, as well as focus groups and in-depth interviews that get at extreme workers' attitudes and motivations. In this article, Hewlett and Luce consider their data in relation to increasing competitive pressures, vastly improved communication technology, cultural shifts, and other sweeping changes that have made high-stakes employment more prominent. What emerges is a complex picture of the all-consuming career-rewarding in many ways, but not without danger to individuals and to society. By and large, extreme professionals don't feel exploited; they feel exalted. A strong majority of them in the United States-66%-say they love their jobs, and in the global companies survey, this figure rises to 76%. The authors' research suggests, however, that women are at a disadvantage. Although they don't shirk the pressure or responsibility of extreme work, they are not matching the hours logged by their male colleagues. This constitutes a barrier for ambitious women, but it also means that employers face a real opportunity: They can find better ways to tap the talents of women who will commit to hard work and responsibility but cannot put in over-long days.     

Reclaim your job

Ask most managers what gets in the way of their success, and you'll hear the familiar litany of complaints: Not enough time. Limited resources. No clear sense of how their work fits into the grand corporate scheme. These are, for the most part, excuses. What really gets in the way of managers' success is fear of making their own decisions and acting accordingly. Managers must overcome the psychological desire to be indispensable. In this article, the authors demonstrate how managers can become more productive by learning to manage demands, generate resources, and recognize and exploit alternatives. To win the support they want, managers must develop a long-term strategy and pursue their goals slowly, steadily, and strategically. To expand the range of opportunities, for their companies and themselves, managers must scan the environment for possible obstacles and search for ways around them. Fully 90% of the executives the authors have studied over the past few years wasted their time and frittered away their productivity, despite having well-defined projects, goals, and the necessary knowledge to get their jobs done. Such managers remain trapped in inefficiency because they assume they do not have enough personal discretion or control. They forget how to take initiative--the most essential quality of any truly successful manager. Effective managers, by contrast, are purposeful corporate entrepreneurs who take charge of their jobs by developing trust in their own judgment and adopting long-term, big-picture views to fulfill personal goals that match those of the organization.     

Work and life: the end of the zero-sum game

Most companies view work and personal life as competing priorities in a zero-sum game, in which a gain in one area means a loss in the other. From this traditional perspective, managers decide how their employees' work and personal lives should intersect and often view work-life programs as just so much social welfare. A new breed of managers, however, is trying a new tack, one in which managers and employees collaborate to achieve work and personal objectives to everyone's benefit. These managers are guided by three principles. The first is to clearly inform their employees about business priorities and to encourage them to be just as clear about personal priorities. The second is to recognize and support their employees as whole people, not only acknowledging but also celebrating their roles outside the office. The third is to continually experiment with the way work gets done, looking for approaches that enhance the organization's performance and allow employees to pursue personal goals. The managers who are acting on these principles have discovered that conflicts between work and personal priorities can actually be catalysts for identifying inefficiencies at the workplace. For example, one manager and his staff found a way to accommodate the increased workload at their 24-hour-a-day command center while granting the staff more concentrated time off. So far, these managers have usually been applying the principles without official sanction. But as the business impact of their approach becomes better appreciated, the authors predict, more and more companies will view these leaders as heralds of change.     

Effects of an Information Sharing System on Employee Creativity,Engagement, and Performance

Many service organizations rely on information sharing systems to boost employee creativity to meet customer needs. We conducted a field experiment in a retail chain, based on a registered report accepted by JAR, to test whether an information sharing system recording employees’ creative work affected the quality of creative work, job engagement, and financial performance. We found that, on average, this system did not have a significant effect on any of these outcomes. However, it significantly improved the quality of creative work in stores that had accessed the system more frequently and in stores with fewer same‐company nearby stores. It also improved creative work and job engagement in stores in divergent markets, where customers needed more customization. We found weak evidence of better financial results where salespeople had lower creative talent before the system was introduced. Our findings shed light on those conditions in which information sharing systems affect employees’ creative work.     

Is American business working for the poor?

At first glance, poverty seems to have little to do with business. When most people--managers included--think about poverty, they assume that people are poor because they are isolated from the mainstream economy, not productive participants in it. But according to Harvard University professors Mary Jo Bane and David Ellwood, this is a misleading image of the true face of poverty in the United States today. Most poor adults--and a full 90% of poor children--live in families where work is the norm, not the exception. Poor people often work or want to work. But at the low-wage end of the American economy, having a job is no guarantee of avoiding poverty. Poverty is a business issue, then, because the American poor are part of the American work force. And this poses a problem for managers. In a more competitive and fast-changing economic environment, the performance of companies increasingly depends on the capabilities of their employees. In response to this human-resource challenge, more and more managers are embracing the language of "empowerment". And yet how can low-wage employees believe empowerment when their experience of work is, quite literally, impoverishment? It is unlikely that American companies can create the work force of the future with the poverty policies of the past. Fortunately, there are some simple policy mechanisms that can assist the working poor without putting an undue burden on business. Enacting them, however, requires managers to see poverty policy as one part of a national human-resource strategy that links the strategic concerns of companies to a broad social agenda.     

The alternative workplace: changing where and how people work

Today many organizations, including AT&T and IBM, are pioneering the alternative workplace--the combination of nontraditional work practices, settings, and locations that is beginning to supplement traditional offices. This is not a fad. Although estimates vary widely, it is safe to say that some 30 million to 40 million people in the United States are now either telecommuters or home-based workers. What motivates managers to examine how people spend their time at the office and where else they might do their work? Among the potential benefits for companies are reduced costs, increased productivity, and an edge in vying for and keeping talented employees. They can also capture government incentives and avoid costly sanctions. But at the same time, alternative workplace programs are not for everyone. Indeed, such programs can be difficult to adopt, even for those organizations that seem to be most suited to them. Ingrained behaviors and practical hurdles are hard to overcome. And the challenges of managing both the cultural changes and systems improvements required by an alternative workplace initiative are substantial. How should senior managers think about alternative workplace programs? What are the criteria for determining whether the alternative workplace is right for a given organization? What are the most common pitfalls in implementing alternative workplace programs? The author provides the answers to these questions in his examination of this new frontier of where and how people work.     

Saving your rookie managers from themselves

Most organizations promote employees into managerial positions based on their technical competence. But very often, that kind of competence does not translate into good managerial performance. Many rookie managers fail to grasp how their roles have changed: that their jobs are no longer about personal achievement but about enabling others to achieve, that sometimes driving the bus means taking a backseat, and that building a team is often more important than cutting a deal. Even the best employees have trouble adjusting to these new realities, and that trouble can be exacerbated by the normal insecurities that may make rookie managers hesitant to ask for help. The dynamic unfolds something like this: As rookie managers internalize their stress, their focus, too, becomes increasingly internal. They become insecure and self-focused and cannot properly support their teams. Invariably, trust breaks down, staff members become alienated, and productivity suffers. In this article, coach and management consultant Carol Walker, who works primarily with rookie managers and their supervisors, addresses the five problem areas that rookie managers typically face: delegating, getting support from senior staffers, projecting confidence, thinking strategically, and giving feedback. You may think these elements sound like Management 101, and you'd be right, Walker writes. But these basic elements are also what trip up most managers in the early stages of their careers (and even, she admits, throughout their careers). The bosses of rookie managers have a responsibility to anticipate and address these problems; not doing so will hurt the rookie, the boss, and the company overall.     

Corporate reporting implication in migrating from defined benefit to defined contribution pension schemes: A focus on the UK

Pensions are intricately linked to employees’ well-being in the latter part of their life and during their working life in that they provide a sense of financial security in retirement. Since the 1980s, pension schemes have changed both in concept and detail with significant consequences for beneficiaries. This paper explores one of the major changes: the migration from defined benefit (DB) to defined contribution (DC) pension schemes focusing on this change's interface with accounting. In exploring this shift from DB to DC schemes, the paper uses a critical perspective to reflect on this interface including how the change is accounted for in corporate reporting narrative. The key focus is on issues of political economy: it is found in this respect that while wealth is effectively distributed from pension holders efforts are made to legitimise or displace attention from pension changes. An analysis of narratives of corporate annual reports is undertaken to critically explore corporate communication to stakeholders vis-à-vis pension scheme changes. Findings suggest limited and problematic engagement with employees as per the corporate annual report narrative. We also point to a lack of appetite on the part of existing employees to engage employers on these changes. The change is framed to give workers an impression that they are taking responsibility for their future whilst an alternative view is that in actuality the organisation is decoupling from pension responsibility and devolving associated risks to employees for greater profitability. Counter accounting may be a way forward.     

Managing demographic risk

In developed nations, the workforce is aging rapidly. That trend has serious implications. Companies could face severe labor shortages in a few years as workers retire, taking critical knowledge with them. Businesses may also see productivity decline among older employees, especially in physically demanding jobs. The authors, partners at Boston Consulting Group, offer managers a systematic way to assess these dual threats--capacity risk and productivity risk--at their companies. It involves studying the age distribution of their employees to see if large percentages fall within high age brackets and then projecting--by location, unit, and job category--how the distribution will change over the next 15 years. Managers must also factor in both the impact of strategic moves on personnel needs and the future supply of workers in the market. When RWE Power analyzed its trends, the company learned that in 2018 almost 80% of its workers would be over 50. What's more, in certain critical areas its labor surplus was about to become a sizable shortfall. For instance, a shortage of specialized engineers would develop in the company just as their ranks in the job market thinned and competition to hire them intensified. Reversing its downsizing course, RWE Power took steps to increase its supply of workers in those key positions. The authors show how companies that face talent gaps, as RWE Power did, can close them through training, transfers, recruitment, retention, productivity improvements, and outsourcing. They also describe measures that companies can take to keep older workers productive, including workplace accommodations, revised compensation structures, performance incentives, and targeted health care management. The key is to identify and address potential problems early. Firms that do so will gain an edge on rivals that are still relentlessly focused on reducing head count.     

The new boundaries of the "boundaryless" company

In an economy founded on innovation and change, one of the premier challenges of management is to design more flexible organizations. For many executives, a single metaphor has come to embody this managerial challenge and to capture the kind of organization they want to create: the "corporation without boundaries." According to Larry Hirschhorn and Thomas Gilmore of the Wharton Center for Applied Research, managers are right to break down the boundaries that make organizations rigid and unresponsive. But they are wrong if they think that doing so eliminates the need for boundaries altogether. Once the traditional boundaries of hierarchy, function, and geography disappear, a new set of boundaries becomes important. These new boundaries are more psychological than organizational. They aren't drawn on a company's organizational chart but in the minds of its managers and employees. And instead of being reflected in a company's structure, they must be "enacted" over and over again in a manager's relationships with bosses, subordinates, and peers. In this article, Hirschhorn and Gilmore provide a guide to the boundaries that matter in the "boundaryless" company. They explain how these new boundaries are essential for both managers and employees in coping with the demands of flexible work. They describe the typical mistakes that managers make in their boundary relationships. And they show how executives can become effective boundary managers by paying attention to a source of data they have often overlooked in the past: their own gut feelings about work and the people with whom they do it.