COVID-19 has forced organizations to adapt to the new norm of Remote Work.  Many people consider telecommuting as the future of work.  Employers who allow Remote Work have seen enhanced employee morale, output, and efficiency.

However, Remote Work setting is far from business as usual.  Management needs to understand and manage the intricate differences between in-office and remote teams.  To make Remote Work successful and to manage remote teams, leadership needs to follow 5 guiding principles:

• Assemble a group of people— skilled in Remote Work setting—to supervise and support other employees to work remotely, assess any challenges, and create workable solutions in real time.
• Develop and share (across the organization) a comprehensive reference guide—e.g., a repository, manual, or a web page—documenting exhaustive information on process changes. This will keep all stakeholders informed and prevent any uncertainties.
• Communicate with the employees transparently and frequently, foster informal communication, and provide easily accessible video conference facilities for people to adjust to and incorporate change.
• Keep the number of tools to handle documentation and communication to a minimum.
• Manage the Remote Workforce by establishing candid, ongoing communication channels, trust, and shared objectives. Transition from an in-office setup to a remote environment takes time.

Likewise, remote employees need to follow certain guiding principles to undertake their responsibilities effectively and deliver on their tasks efficiently.

• Establish a dedicated workspace.
• Make their families understand the significance of their work—that they perform from their virtual offices—and respect their work hours.
• Set alarms to remind when to take a break or end work, so as to work in a healthy routine. Use breaks to recharge your brain or to do errands.
• Communicate informally with your team.
• Try out unconventional workdays and routines that work best for you.
• Adopt this transition

Conventional on-site work settings have clearly defined processes, team structures, interactions, and Organizational Culture, which are lacking in most virtual environments.  The transition from on-site work to work-from-anywhere demands concrete steps to make it viable.  It is critical to adopt Virtual Work mindset and best practices since every organization today, in one way or another, is a virtual company—e.g., global operations, sites and offices across different locations.

This necessitates dedicated efforts to nurture and promote a virtual-work focus and Culture, rather than managing Remote Work with a traditional mindset.  Organizations need to incorporate these 5 best practices to make the transition from conventional to work-from-anywhere environment smoother.

1. Document everything
2. Have more structured meetings
3. Align values with expectations
4. Create ergonomic home offices
5. Adopt a self-learning mentality

Let’s delve deeper into these best practices.

Document everything

In office settings, people can run into other colleagues easily to ask queries or just to communicate with them.  This is at times disturbing and counterproductive.  Work-from-anywhere environment demands documenting every critical piece of information, creating guidelines and manuals, and implementing documentation best practices.   This facilitates in:

• Creating a reliable, primary source of information for everyone to seek answers to their queries.
• Building successful Virtual Work environment.
• Clearly outlining organizational objectives.
• Visualization and clarity of teams’ collective goals and performance results.
• Orientation of new hires by providing answers to everything that comes to their minds.
• Offering more inclusivity, as the information is not confined only to the ones present at the physical water cooler, but is available for the entire organization.
• Precluding a sense of exclusion in the ones who are not part of a physical office.
• Gathering more diverse ideas.

A handbook culture is even better than “water coolers”—as it saves time by eliminating the need to bother other teammates and ask questions from them.  It enables learning, finding answers or information more readily, and curtailing rework arising out of gathering and updating information over and over again.  Documenting everything instills a sense of ownership, courtesy, and concern for others in virtual teams.

Interested in learning more about the other best practices to transition from in-office to work-from-anywhere environment?  You can download an editable PowerPoint presentation on how to transition from In-Office to Virtual Work Setting here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

Do You Find Value in This Framework?

You can download in-depth presentations on this and hundreds of similar business frameworks from the FlevyPro Library. FlevyPro is trusted and utilized by 1000s of management consultants and corporate executives.  Here’s what some have to say:

“My FlevyPro subscription provides me with the most popular frameworks and decks in demand in today’s market. They not only augment my existing consulting and coaching offerings and delivery, but also keep me abreast of the latest trends, inspire new products and service offerings for my practice, and educate me in a fraction of the time and money of other solutions. I strongly recommend FlevyPro to any consultant serious about success.”

– Bill Branson, Founder at Strategic Business Architects

“As a niche strategic consulting firm, Flevy and FlevyPro frameworks and documents are an on-going reference to help us structure our findings and recommendations to our clients as well as improve their clarity, strength, and visual power. For us, it is an invaluable resource to increase our impact and value.”

– David Coloma, Consulting Area Manager at Cynertia Consulting

“As a small business owner, the resource material available from FlevyPro has proven to be invaluable. The ability to search for material on demand based our project events and client requirements was great for me and proved very beneficial to my clients. Importantly, being able to easily edit and tailor the material for specific purposes helped us to make presentations, knowledge sharing, and toolkit development, which formed part of the overall program collateral. While FlevyPro contains resource material that any consultancy, project or delivery firm must have, it is an essential part of a small firm or independent consultant’s toolbox.”

– Michael Duff, Managing Director at Change Strategy (UK)

“FlevyPro has been a brilliant resource for me, as an independent growth consultant, to access a vast knowledge bank of presentations to support my work with clients. In terms of RoI, the value I received from the very first presentation I downloaded paid for my subscription many times over! The quality of the decks available allows me to punch way above my weight – it’s like having the resources of a Big 4 consultancy at your fingertips at a microscopic fraction of the overhead.”

– Roderick Cameron, Founding Partner at SGFE Ltd

“Several times a month, I browse FlevyPro for presentations relevant to the job challenge I have (I am a consultant). When the subject requires it, I explore further and buy from the Flevy Marketplace. On all occasions, I read them, analyze them. I take the most relevant and applicable ideas for my work; and, of course, all this translates to my and my clients’ benefits.”

– Omar Hernán Montes Parra, CEO at Quantum SFE

Supply chain management across industries is revolutionizing at a rapid pace by technology.  By implementing technology systems, supply chain organizations aspire to eliminate waste, meet customers’ needs at reasonable costs, and ensure profitability.  Enterprise Resource Planning systems facilitate in processing unstructured data at an aggregated level.  However, at workflow or micro level the data produced through ERPs needs to be further refined to understand costs.

Supply chain experts need to look at their unstructured data and understand the cost of offering a product; know which product mix they should promote; and gauge the impact of service levels on transportation costs, profits, and pricing strategy.

Supply Chain Executives can use the Cost-to-Serve (CTS) Analysis approach to control distribution costs, identify negative-margin products, and prevent profit leakages.  CTS Analysis affords the organizations the means to identify the total cost of serving customers—including all the costs in a product’s value chain (from raw material to delivery)—at the product as well as customer levels.  The approach helps leaders split and evaluate individual customers, geographies, products, product families, or combinations of products / customers.

The Cost-to-Serve Analysis can be undertaken to identify costs related to Supply Chains, Logistics, Distribution, Warehousing, or Transportation.  CTSA allocates indirect cost to products—overhead or fixed costs that are not easily and directly attributable to a single order, shipment, or activity.

The CTS model for costing entails detailed modeling of all the value and non-value added activities in the process.  The approach is more precise than other methods in determining “what-if” budgets, as it accounts for all the activities and link them with their relevant cost pools.  CTS employs an activity-based modelling algorithm—which segregates the entire supply chain into multiple tasks while calculating the costs at every task—to help the supply chain practitioners calculate costs at various levels.

The CTS Framework entails 5 fundamental steps:

1. Obtain Buy-in from Key Stakeholders
2. Conduct Cost Categorization
3. Determine per Unit Cost Breakdown
4. Develop Classification Matrices
5. Make Joint Decisions

Let’s delve deeper into the first 2 steps of the CTS Framework.

1. Obtain Buy-in from Key Stakeholders

The first step to implement Cost-to-Serve Framework involves getting across-the-board agreement and stakeholder buy-in.  The decision to calculate the impact of cost to serve on revenue entails engagement and collaboration from multiple departments in a company.  Multiple cost centers work in partnership across a value chain and thus profit and loss responsibility cannot be attached to a specific unit.

For instance, a decision to trim down the costs to serve a customer (or various customers) has to be agreed upon by stakeholders from the:

• Sales and marketing department to calculate the impact of service level agreements.
• Logistics function to calculate the cost impact.
• Go-to-market Strategy to ensure alignment with Corporate Strategy
• Warehousing unit to ensure resource planning and allocation.

2. Conduct Cost Categorization

The 2^nd step of the Cost-to-Serve Framework involves categorization of costs associated with the entire supply chain.  Supply chains typically have various cost centers (or functions): e.g., Procurement, Manufacturing, Warehousing, and Logistics.  These cost centers further have multiple processes with costs associated with all of them.  CTS requires top-down estimation of costs at the process and activity level and then aggregate those back to the cost center level.

This categorization of costs across the various functions of the supply chain and their associated processes facilitates in accurate calculation and obtaining estimates at the micro level.

Interested in learning more about the other steps of the Cost-to-Serve Framework?  You can download an editable PowerPoint presentation on Cost-to-Serve Analysis here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

Are you a Management Consultant?

You can download this and hundreds of other consulting frameworks and consulting training guides from the FlevyPro library.

Product managers, marketers, and designers are often confused as to what they should do to increase the chances of customers’ engagement and uptake of their offering.  Changing individuals’ behavior to enhance engagement, productivity, innovation, and happiness isn’t straightforward.

It takes a lot of effort, time, and resources to execute initiatives aimed at transforming behaviors and Organizational Culture.  However, most people aren’t interested in changing and like the status quo to prevail.  This is where Behavioral Economics can help to know how customers behave, interpret their decision-making methods, and create solutions targeting those behaviors.

Product designers and marketers aspiring to drive acceptance of their products can make use of the 3 Bs of Behavioral Change to change understand consumer behavior. The 3 Bs of Behavioral Change classify the 3 elements essential to change behaviors, i.e.:

1. Behavior
2. Barriers
3. Benefits

Understanding and employing these 3 Bs helps the designers and product managers instill change, inspire design and strategy-related decisions, increase the acceptance of new products / features and product engagement levels, and build new behaviors in people.

Let’s discuss the first 2 elements in detail.

Behavior

People have an inherent tendency to maintain the status quo.  Behavioral change necessitates:

• Identifying individuals’ existing attitudes.
• Assessing and tackling psychological biases affecting individuals’ decisions.
• Carefully tracking behaviors that need to be changed.
• Ascertaining the most important desired behavior and exact action that is imperative to drive results.
• Getting the buy-in from all stakeholders on the key behavior.
• Deciding if the behavior should be permanent or transient.

Examples of key actions to change behaviors include spending 30 minutes thrice weekly doing cardio exercises and consuming salad at lunch daily to stay healthy.

Barriers

Understanding the barriers in behavior adoption assists in creating effective solutions to improve uptake of key behavior.  The second step to induce behavioral change is to reduce barriers in its adoption.

• Every decision that a product user has to make, no matter how negligible, increases resistance in the likelihood of completing a specific behavior.
• These actions and decisions, that an individual has to take in order to achieve the desired behavior, create points of friction in embracing key behaviors.  For instance, people often find it difficult to decide when presented with complex choices. They tend to procrastinate or become a victim of decision paralysis.
• Removing the points of friction and resistance from any key behavior necessitates documenting and streamlining all decisions. The path of least resistance leads to desired key behaviors.

Examples of barriers include the thought process involved in the decision to select where to have dinner.  This thought process is, in fact, a psychological barrier in actually going out and having dinner.  Likewise, the decision to walk or drive to a restaurant is a logistical barrier and a point of friction that warrants making a decision.

To eliminate these barriers, we can either remove barriers entirely or just simplify the decision.  For instance, elimination of a non-critical, open text field from a sign-up form—that probed the users about their business, which requires significant time to think and answer—can increase page-over-page conversion.  In case choices are helpful for the users and cannot be eliminated, then it is best to simplify the decision process by giving fewer options instead of many, or by suggesting “recommended option” to the users.

Interested in learning more about the details of the 3 Bs of Behavioral Change?  You can download an editable PowerPoint presentation on 3 Bs of Behavioral Change here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

Are you a Management Consultant?

You can download this and hundreds of other consulting frameworks and consulting training guides from the FlevyPro library.

The single most pressing challenge for an organization in this knowledge economy is attracting and retaining talented people.  This can be a make or break challenge for the organization and warrants careful consideration during Strategic Planning.

Starting on the right foot is absolutely essential to overcoming this challenge.  Organizations, particularly HR, need to have an Organizational Culture that boasts of an effective Employee Onboarding process.  In order to accomplish this, present-day HR needs to be clear regarding the challenges of modern-day Onboarding and develop a strategy to establish an onboarding process that yields a rewarding experience for the employees.

At many organizations the Employee Onboarding process follows a customary theme—a run down on “how things are done here”—with the traditional HR view that if the employee can be made to commit to the Organizational Culture from the get-go, they are easier to retain.

Such an Onboarding process does not help the new employee adjust to the company or the role, become an Engaged Employee, and meet the expectations of the organization.  Experts have identified various challenges with this conventional Onboarding approach.  Here is a list of 8 most frequent challenges:

1. Poor Socialization of Organizational Values
2. Lack of Role Clarity
3. Challenges with Expectations and Results
4. Managing Change
5. Issues with Time Management
6. Issues with the Manager
7. Navigating the Culture
8. Handling Personal Transition and Relocation

By addressing these challenges appropriately, organizations can establish a rewarding Employee Onboarding experience that results in Employee Retention, quality output in the short-term, and enhanced productivity in the longer run.

Let us delve a little deeper into the challenges.

1. Poor Socialization of Organizational Values

It is presumed that Organizational Values are a thing to be imparted and accepted by the new employee.  This is, indeed, essential knowledge, but it is not sacrosanct.  Studies suggest acceptance of organizational values in contravention of one’s own identity may be counter-productive in that it may exhaust the employee psychologically, restrict full engagement, hinder creativity, and create work dissatisfaction.  This can be overcome by allowing employee to express their unique perspective on the job from the beginning and welcoming them to incorporate what they do best in their work.

2. Lack of Role Clarity

Lack of clear understanding of one’s role is a widespread problem in organizations.  After spending some time in the new organization, the employee realizes that the expectation of the role is conflicting with what the employee thought he/she accepted.  Encouraging the new employee to identify the gaps in the expectation / perception and discussing it with their managers enables the employees to have a clear perspective and understanding of their roles and responsibilities, enhances employee satisfaction levels, and improves their efficiency and productivity.

3. Challenges with Expectations and Results

New employees are often unable to realize their workload.  In order to meet the perceived expectation of managers or peers, they take on too much of work resulting in overload, which diminishes their performance.  Informal discussions of new employees with managers and peers regarding their expectations eases the pressure and enables them to take on what is manageable and deliver quality results.

Interested in learning more about various aspects of Employee Onboarding, guiding principles, challenges, and approaches?  You can download an editable PowerPoint on Employee Onboarding here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

Are you a Management Consultant?

You can download this and hundreds of other consulting frameworks and consulting training guides from the FlevyPro library.

Mediocre people occupying senior leadership positions is one of the chief reasons for the fiasco and humiliation that organizations like Enron and WorldCom faced.  The practice of recruiting average people at the top is omnipresent and often goes unnoticed until the results begin to surface, which is typically too late for any intervention.

Smart people decisions matter a lot in achieving profitability.  Research indicates that a return on average human asset of 5% is typical in many industries.  However, a senior executive selection of 2 standard deviations below the average yields -15% return on asset.  An executive selection with 2 standard deviations above average causes +25% return, which is 5 times the average.  Increased investment in finding and hiring the best senior executives fetches returns to the magnitude of 1000%.

Attracting and selecting the best people for senior leadership positions isn’t a small feat.  The future of organizations depend on it.  However, the Human Resource Management function at most organizations fail in getting the right people at the top.  The decision to hire at the senior positions necessitates deliberate effort and commitment.  Identification and onboarding of right people at these levels can create a substantial competitive advantage and profitability for the organizations.  Leading companies invest a lot of time in these decisions and conduct careful assessment of a pool of candidates.  They evaluate the opportunity costs associated with onboarding wrong people at critical senior positions and those associated with performance that could not get delivered due to selection of incompetent individual(s).

To prevent the disasters caused by psychological barriers and biases and to onboard competent executives, organizations need to religiously follow these 8 guiding principles:

1. Outline requirements
2. Prepare a large candidate pool
3. Benchmark rationally
4. Appraise systematically
5. Overcome resistance in decision making
6. Keep the evaluation team small
7. Finalize the deal in time
8. Support assimilation of new hires

Let’s discuss the 4 guiding principles in detail, for now.

Outline requirements

Defining the job requirements clearly before initiating the executive search process is an imperative for finding and appointing the right persons at senior positions.  The board should take out time to hold meetings to sift through the organizational strategic objectives and prioritized initiatives.  The outcome of these sessions help the recruiters develop a list of critical skills and behavioral competencies.

Prepare a large candidate pool

Restricting executive search to specific geographies or industries limits the chances of finding the most suitable candidate(s).  For instance, to hire the country head for a computer hardware firm in Asia, a company may identify all C-level executives at specific large hardware and software providers in the region; target former top executives of all relevant companies; consider senior executives outside the hardware sector; and shortlist about 10-12 top candidates to be interviewed.

Benchmark rationally

Having a fair comparison of shortlisted candidates is possible by creating consistent benchmarks.  This helps all the appraisers to follow a defined approach and rating criteria.  External and internal candidates should be assessed without any biasness.  Likewise, comparison of soft skills—which are obvious to internal candidates but unknown to outsiders—should be done on equal footing.

Appraise systematically

After shortlisting potential candidates, it’s time to evaluate their suitability on the required competencies through rigorous interviews using behavioral-based questions.  The evaluation should constitute in-depth reference checking—through the nominees as well as those who have worked with the candidates in the past—internally or through executive search firms.For more information on selection and hiring “the best of the best,” take a look at the Fiaccabrino Selection Process (FSP).  Download a free primer on FSP here.

Interested in learning more about the other guiding principles critical for selection of competent senior executives?  You can download an editable PowerPoint presentation on Executive Selection here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

Are you a Management Consultant?

You can download this and hundreds of other consulting frameworks and consulting training guides from the FlevyPro library.

Mediocre people occupying senior Leadership positions is one of the chief reasons for the fiasco and humiliation that organizations like Enron and WorldCom faced.  The practice of recruiting average people at the top is omnipresent and often goes unnoticed until the results begin to surface, which is typically too late for any intervention.

Smart people decisions matter a lot in achieving profitability.  Research indicates that a return on average human asset of 5% is typical in many industries.  However, a senior executive selection of 2 standard deviations below the average yields -15% return on asset.  An executive selection with 2 standard deviations above average causes 25+% return, which is 5 times the average.  Increased investment in finding and hiring the best senior executives fetches returns to the magnitude of 1000%.

Attracting and selecting the best people for senior leadership positions isn’t a small feat.  The future of organizations depend on it.  However, not too many organizations succeed in getting the right people at the top.  The reason for this failure is attributed predominantly to 3 critical obstacles that hinder in making the right recruitment decisions at such a crucial level.  Wrong Executive Selection decisions due to these 3 obstacles bring about losses and negative returns:

1. Obstacle of Rarity
2. Obstacle of the Unknown
3. Obstacle of Psychological Traps

Let’s talk about these obstacles in a bit of detail.

Obstacle of Rarity

The first barrier to finding outstanding executives for senior positions is their scarcity, as excellent executives are a rare breed.  Sophisticated skills that make an executive standout aren’t common.  They are distributed in a given sample.

Outstanding people perform at a much higher level than that of their peers, particularly at the top positions.  A blue-collar executive with 1 standard deviation above the mean translates to 20% more productive individual than an average executive.  With increasing complexity of job, the difference between the top performer and an average performer increases considerably.

Appointments at the senior positions do not go without assessment errors, which can prove to be extremely costly.  Even an accuracy level of 90% in executive assessment isn’t satisfactory.  This results in a number of mistakenly categorized top performers and rejection of outstanding candidates.

Obstacle of the Unknown

Another barrier to the Executive Selection process is the predictive assessment of candidates on the skills and attributes required and the actual delivery capabilities of the individuals.  It is difficult to assess the unknown.

Competencies at the junior levels are easier to define, but it gets difficult to pinpoint the skills required at the top level.  The skills required at the top keeps on changing due to the evolving political, technological and economic landscape.  The skills required today get obsolete over time.  In case the exact requirements for a position are fully known, it isn’t certain whether a candidate meets the requirements in their entirety.

Accurate assessment of the candidates’ behavior and competencies is difficult but worth investing efforts and resources.  “Soft” skills—e.g., leading people, coaching and developing teams, teamwork, and managing Business Transformation—are what differentiate the senior leaders, but gauging these skills necessitates thorough evaluation and considerable time, which is difficult at senior levels.

Obstacle of Psychological Traps

A number of psychological traps are associated with cognitive biases in humans that hinder the decision making abilities in people and incapacitate the hiring process.  8 types of psychological traps are most common in individuals:

• Procrastination
• Assuming incorrectly
• Impulsive judgment based on first impressions
• Discounting the warning signs
• Covering mistakes
• Bonding with familiarity
• Emotional anchoring
• Tendency to follow the majority

For more information on selection and hiring “the best of the best,” take a look at the Fiaccabrino Selection Process (FSP).  Download a free primer on FSP here.

Interested in learning more about the 3 critical obstacles that hinder right Executive Selection?  You can download an editable PowerPoint presentation on Executive Selection here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

Are you a Management Consultant?

You can download this and hundreds of other consulting frameworks and consulting training guides from the FlevyPro library.

A job consists of various critical elements that are essential to achieve enterprise outcomes—i.e., talent and behavioral requirements, role, and responsibilities.  Jobs that are configured inadequately bread disputes, negative perceptions, inequality, and frustration.  On the other hand, structured jobs, appropriate distribution of work, justified authority levels, and correct estimation of value of individual jobs are the signs of effective Human Capital Management function.

The lack of a structured job design—or ill-defined jobs—renders the organizations ineffective and burdened with excessive staffing and payroll costs.  This warrants from the leadership to plan and undertake a Job Leveling initiative.  Job Leveling is a disciplined approach to gauge the value of work for individual positions across the organization.  It entails ascertaining the nature of work done by each position, authority levels, and the effect of each job on business results.  The initiative is critical in administering rewards structures.

However, Job Leveling is a concern at most organizations—not many people are satisfied with the value assigned to their roles.  The absence of proper—or inadequate—job levels yields grave consequences for the entire organization.  Jobs valued higher than their actual value lead to wastage of resources, whereas low valued jobs are perceived as offensive and inculcate demotivation.

Job Design and Job Leveling is essential when organizations consistently encounter these issues:

• Constant employees complaints and demands to reclassify jobs
• Excessive job titles
• Widespread dissatisfaction with remuneration
• Task / processes redundancy
• Financial outflow
• Staffing imbalances and top heavy structure

Workforce planners should use a Job Leveling Framework to methodically benchmark the value of jobs at their organizations.  To accomplish this, they need to first analyze all the activities required under each position, the professional competences and demeanor essential to perform those activities, and gauging the effect each position has on business results.

Implementing a Job Leveling Framework simplifies the allocation of jobs in a harmonized job hierarchy, establishes consistency across the HR Initiatives, develops clear paths for growth, and improves decision making.

Human Resources practitioners need to follow these 5 key phases to implement a Job Leveling Framework and structure job levels at their organizations:

1. Ensure Readiness of Pre-Implementation Groundwork
2. Engage Business Leaders in Implementation
3. Set up Clear Governance Structures
4. Employ User-friendly Job Evaluation Management Tools
5. Establish Clear Communication Mechanisms

Let’s dive deeper into the first 3 phases of the Job Leveling Framework Implementation, for now.

Ensure Readiness of Pre-Implementation Groundwork

Human Resource practitioners should first analyze their existing job architecture, job natures, roles and responsibilities, and Organizational Culture to initiate the Job Leveling process.  Specifically, they have to answer these queries to identify the right Job Levelling method:

• What is the key objective to be achieved by implementing the Job Leveling initiative? Is it to improve compensation, shape career paths, or alleviate pay equity concerns?
• Who will be the users of the Job Leveling system? Will it be managed by Human Resources experts or business leaders?
• The Job Leveling exercise will impact which employees? How many roles, their nature of jobs, locations?
• Define the organizational culture and values. Is it hierarchical, centralized, or cost-focused?

Engage Business Leaders in Implementation

Effective Job Levelling Implementation necessitates involvement of business leaders from the onset of the exercise.  Engaging business managers and employees can hold back the pace of implementation because of conflicting views and ideas, but this is essential for the success of Job Leveling.  The right engagement involves:

• Getting agreement and support from senior business leaders.
• Including business leaders in calibration of key roles for support later during execution phase.
• Coaching key line managers and including them in job evaluation sessions to ensure adequate understanding of the roles and to develop program sponsors during implementation.
• Including key employees during the design phase of Job Leveling to remove any suspicion and win their agreement.

Set up Clear Governance Structures

Establishing effective control mechanisms is essential to avoid any glitches in implementing coherent job levels.  Job Leveling initiatives in large multinational corporations fail because of dearth of appropriate governance mechanisms in place.  A few organizations adopt centralized controls whereas others employ decentralized, locally-driven governance protocols.  To execute clear yet robust governance mechanisms, organizations should follow these key tenets:

• Governance principles should correspond to the organizational culture.
• Stakeholders should be held accountable with clear roles.
• Authorities should be assigned to ensure proper control mechanisms.
• All concerned people should be engaged in the initiative.
• Decision making authorities should be clearly defined.
• Resources should be effectively deployed.
• Promote fairness by applying rules equally, or if not, rationale is clearly explained.

Interested in learning more about the other phases of Job Leveling Implementation and Job Leveling methods? You can download an editable PowerPoint on HR Strategy: Job Leveling Framework Implementation here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

Are you a Management Consultant?

You can download this and hundreds of other consulting frameworks and consulting training guides from the FlevyPro library.

Inadequately structured jobs create disputes, negative perceptions, inequality, and frustration among employees.  On the other hand, well-articulated jobs, appropriate distribution of work, justified authority levels, and correct estimation of value of individual jobs elevate employee engagement levels, productivity, and job satisfaction.  Organized job levels are a sign of effective Human Resources Management function.

The lack of a structured job design—and ill-defined jobs—renders the organizations ineffective and burdened with excessive staffing and payroll costs.  This warrants from the leadership to plan and undertake a Job Leveling initiative.  Job Leveling is a disciplined approach to gauge the value of work for individual positions across the organization.  It entails ascertaining the nature of work done by each position, authority levels, and the effect of each job on business results.  The initiative is critical in administering rewards structures.

However, Job Leveling is a concern at most organizations—not many people are satisfied with the value assigned to their roles.  The absence of proper—or inadequate—job levels yields grave consequences for the entire organization.  Jobs valued higher than their actual value lead to wastage of resources, whereas low valued jobs are perceived as offensive and inculcate demotivation.

Job Design and Job Leveling is essential when organizations consistently encounter issues, such as:

• Constant employees complaints and demands to reclassify jobs
• Excessive job titles
• Widespread dissatisfaction with remuneration
• Task / processes redundancy
• Financial outflow
• Staffing imbalances and top heavy structure

Workforce planners should lay out a clearly-defined Job Leveling Framework to tackle these issues and methodically benchmark the value of jobs at their organizations.  To accomplish this, they need to first analyze all the activities required under each position, the professional competences and demeanor essential to perform those activities, and gauging the effect each position has on business results.

The 4 core benefits to developing and executing an efficient Job Leveling Framework include:

1. Establish Consistency across the Human Resource Initiatives
2. Develop Clear Paths for Career Growth
3. Improve Ease of Administration
4. Increase Flexibility for M&A

Let’s delve deeper into 3 of these benefits, for now.

Establish Consistency Across the HR Initiatives

A standardized job evaluation approach enables a consistent job structure terminology.  It makes communication and Job Leveling related decisions easier.  A Job Leveling Framework aids in defining relative placement of various jobs, using elements, such as, knowledge, problem solving, interaction, impact, and accountabilities.  Alignment of jobs through a Job Leveling Framework helps in developing consistency across other HR initiatives and make better talent related decisions.

Develop Clear Paths for Career Growth

Organizations use clear career pathways to enhance employee engagement, meet employee expectations, and provide opportunities for their development.  A Job Leveling Framework provide clear-cut job structure to inspire the employees.  Career pathways developed through Job Leveling Framework helps the leaders as they strive to improve the amount of mobility across teams, units, and divisions.

Improve Ease of Administration

A Job Leveling Framework assists in developing efficient methods to administer HR initiatives.  A Job Leveling Framework enables improved efficiencies and decisions related to key talent and their work.  For instance, it streamlines pay grades and salary structures; standardizes job titles; simplifies short-term incentive criteria and objectives definition; and structures long-term reward eligibility criteria and nominations.

Interested in learning more about the Job Leveling Framework and benefits associated with its implementation? You can download an editable PowerPoint on HR Strategy: Job Leveling Framework here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

Are you a Management Consultant?

You can download this and hundreds of other consulting frameworks and consulting training guides from the FlevyPro library.

Organizations typically focus on Customer-centric Design in their Strategic Planning and overlook the critical driver of Performance, Growth, and Operational Excellence—their employees.  With cut-throat competition now the norm the realization has become clearer that employees are:

• The face of the business and create lasting—or perishing—brand impression.
• Sources of innovation and organizational knowledge.
• Representation of the company’s service philosophy.
• Expected to live by its Organizational Culture and values.

Employee Engagement has emerged as one of the significant pillars on which the Competitive Advantage, Productivity, and Growth of an organization rests.  What, exactly, does it mean when an employee is engaged?  Employee Engagement, over the years, has been thought of in terms of:

• Personal engagement with the organization.
• Focus on performance of assigned work.
• Worker burnout.
• Basic needs (meaningful work, safe workplace, abundant resources).
• Attention on Cognitive, Emotional and Behavioral components related to an individual’s performance.

Although Employee Engagement is widely seen as an important concept, there has been little consensus on its definition or its components either in business or in the academic literature.

Kumar and Pansari’s 2015 study define Employee Engagement as:

“a multidimensional construct that comprises all of the different facets of the attitudes and behaviors of employees towards the organization”.

The multidimensional construct of Employee Engagement has been synthesized into the following 5 components (or dimensions).

1. Employee Satisfaction
2. Employee Identification
3. Employee Commitment
4. Employee Loyalty
5. Employee Performance

The 5 dimensions of Employee Engagement have been found to have a direct correlation with high profitability, as substantiated by a number of research studies:

For instance, a study of 30 companies in the airline, telecom and hotel industries shows a close relationship between Employee Engagement and growth in profits.  After controlling other relevant factors—i.e., GDP level, marketing costs, nature of business, and type of goods, the study found:

• Highest profitability growth—10% to 15%—in companies with highly engaged employees.
• Lowest level of profitability growth—0% to 1%—in companies with disengaged employees.

Research reveals that Employee Engagement affects 9 performance outcomes; including Customer Ratings, Profitability, Productivity, Safety Incidents, Shrinkage (theft), Absenteeism, Patient Safety Incidents, Quality (Defects), and Turnover.

The differences in performance between engaged and actively disengaged work units revealed:

• Top half Employee Engagement scores nearly doubled the odds of success compared with those in the bottom half.
• Companies with engaged workforces have higher earnings per share (EPS).

These 5 dimensions become the base for measuring Employee Engagement in a meaningful manner that permits managers to identify areas of improvement.  To assess an organization’s current status of Employee Engagement, a measurement system is needed that includes:

• Metrics for each component of Employee Engagement.
• A scale for scoring metrics in each component.
• A comprehensive scorecard that pulls everything together.

Let us delve a little deeper into the first 2 dimensions of Employee Engagement.

Employee Satisfaction

Definition

Employee Satisfaction is the positive reaction employees have to their overall job circumstances, including their supervisors, pay and coworkers.

Details

When employees are satisfied, they tend to be:

• Committed to their work.
• Less absent and more productive in terms of quality of goods and services.
• Connected with the organization’s values and goals.
• Perceptive about being a part of the organization.

Metrics

The 5 metrics that gauge Employee Engagement in terms of Employee Satisfaction include:

1. Receiving recognition for a job.
2. Feeling close to people at work.
3. Feeling good about working at the organization.
4. Feeling secure about the job.
5. Believing that the management is concerned about employees.

We take a look at another dimension central in significance.

Employee Commitment

Definition

Signifies what motivates the employees to do more than what’s in their job descriptions.

Details

Employee Commitment is much higher for the employees who identify with the organization.  This element:

• Develops over time and is an outcome of shared experiences.
• Is often an antecedent of loyalty.
• Induces employees to guard the organization’s secrets.
• Pushes employees to work for organization’s best interests.

Research has found that employees with the highest levels of commitment:

• Perform 20% better.
• Are 87% less likely to leave the organization.

Metrics

The 3 metrics that gauge the Employee Commitment dimension of Employee Engagement include:

1. Commitment to deliver the brand promise along with knowledge of the brand.
2. Very committed to delivering the brand promise.
3. Feels like the organization has a great deal of personal meaning.

Interested in learning more about these foundational pillars to Employee Engagement? You can download an editable PowerPoint on 5 Dimensions of Employee Engagement here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

Are you a Management Consultant?

You can download this and hundreds of other consulting frameworks and consulting training guides from the FlevyPro library.

Traditional Talent Management practices fail to meet the high-potential talent requirements imperative to compete in the digital world today.  In fact, they disappoint the key talent available in the market.

A 2016 Digital Business research by MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte on 3700+ executives reveals attracting and retaining talent as the most pressing concern for organizations large or small.  The study indicates that organizations that are still using traditional approaches to manage Talent face a number of pressing challenges, including:

• Building new competencies within limited resources.
• Alignment of culture, strategic initiatives, human capital, and hierarchies with organizational objectives.
• Attracting, selecting, and retaining key talent.
• Creating robust Performance Management, compensation, and benefits systems.
• Finding and developing talent with critical capabilities—such as forward thinking, transformative vision, and change focus—alongside technical skills.
• Providing opportunities that require digital skills, to attract and keep critical Talent engaged in the organization.

One of the findings of the 2016 digital business study demonstrate that it’s both the younger as well as middle management people who tend to look elsewhere in case they don’t find opportunities to develop digital skills in their existing organizations.  Such results call for senior management to identify, evaluate, and implement more immediate and appropriate digital technologies methods to attract and retain key talent.  Leading organizations are now incorporating these Talent Transformation efforts into their Digital Transformation programs.

Research on 3700 plus Digital-native respondents further reveals leading organizations to be using a combination of 2 distinct models to manage their Talent:

1. Talent Markets for Contractors
2. Digital Tools for Employees

Let’s discuss the first approach to Talent Management in detail, for now.

Talent Markets for Contractors

Acquisition of right talent necessitates fostering linkages with on-demand talent markets for the timely availability of required talent.  Many organizations seek help from on-demand Talent Markets to attract and sustain talent in the digital business environment.  These organizations pursue a flexible recruitment model using digital platforms to attract skilled contractors and consultants.  Digital talent markets can be expanded or contracted depending on the quantity of work and skillsets required.

Digital talent markets can coordinate the work of full-time employees as well as cover live activities of contractors more nimbly and reliably.  Digital platforms offer superior talent markets to assess and manage large talent pool of contractors.  A few organizations are experimenting with developing their own on-demand talent markets while some have cooperated with other organizations to share talent markets.  It’s up to senior management to decide if they want to leverage existing on-demand talent markets or cultivate their own to ensure availability of required skills when needed.  Talent markets can be nurtured using 3 best practices:

1. Manage on-demand talent markets as a community
2. Strike a balance between full-time and part-time talent
3. Create an environment where the best people want to work

Manage on-demand talent markets as a community

To make the availability of required key talent certain:

• On-demand talent markets should be considered strategic resources and cultivated carefully with future talent requirements in mind.
• Companies should devote resources and efforts to develop their own talent pool.

Strike a balance between full-time and part-time talent

Talent markets are meant to manage freelancers.  However, a few organizations have also begun collaborating with them and deploying their full-time employees to project work that is critical to build new competences.  A few considerations in this regard include:

• Companies need to strike an equilibrium between full-time and part-time talent.
• Some people prefer full-time employment while others fancy flexibility or work from home options.
• Some workforce providers even offer services of retired people with expert skills, who have proved to be a valuable asset.
• Firms can choose on-demand workforce providers to have full-time employees to maintain a steady employee base, or pick part-time contractors to handle workload surges.

Create an environment where the best people want to work

Setting up the right environment is central to attracting and retaining the best flexible, on-demand talent.  A majority of companies consider freelancers or independent contractors inferior to their permanent employees.  Organizations that want to attract great talent should think of contractors as valuable resources and treat them as such.  To get top talent, organizations need to:

• Nurture an Organizational Culture conducive to support on-demand workers.
• Devise remuneration and reward systems that value contractors and full-time employees equally.
• Create an atmosphere that offers attractive work experiences for the employees.
• Deploy people on interesting projects and allow them to experience job rotations to improve their skills sets, problem solving abilities, cross-departmental team collaboration, and improve their engagement levels.

Interested in learning more about the 2 distinct approaches to Talent Management through Digital Transformation? You can download an editable PowerPoint on Digital Transformation: Talent Management here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

Are you a Management Consultant?

You can download this and hundreds of other consulting frameworks and consulting training guides from the FlevyPro library.