Happy at Work | The Happy Future Group

The hopeless rude guy from Planning

May 11, 2009

When I became Sales Director of the poultry processing plant, I also supervised the Inside Sales/Planning/Logistics Department.
One of the employee of that department was causing quite a few conflicts with the Production Department, mostly because of very poor communication skills. Requests sounded more like barking and politeness was a scarce commodity from his side.
That problem probably should have been addressed a long time ago, but OK, I had to deal with it now.
All I got was criticism about his conduct and “fire him!” kind of advice. Yet, he had many years of experience and had quite a lot of knowledge. That bothered me to just take the short cut and let him go.
So, I had a meeting first with him alone and later with his supervisor. In the first meeting, I addressed the problems and made him clear that I wanted to understand what caused him to act the way he did. With his supervisor, we reviewed his job description and analyzed what he liked and what he did not like about his tasks.
And bingo! We discovered that he felt very uncomfortable dealing with foreign customers having to speak in languages he did not master. The stress of the phone ringing and hear someone speaking German or English was just too much for him and he reacted his stress on his colleagues.
We decided to remove the customer contact from him, allocate that to another employee who actually enjoyed the sales side more than the production side, and dedicate our difficult friend more to the technical and planning side of production. Within days, I was receiving positive feedback from production people who were wondering what I had done to him, because now he was such a pleasure to work with.
And for him, as he was in his late 40’s, we also avoided a painful layoff that might have had severe personal consequences.
He was now doing what he liked and what he was best at. And he became very happy at work!

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Posted by Christophe Pelletier

The fun about delegating

April 5, 2009

In this article, I wish to address one of the most effective management technique, which is also one of the most poorly used: delegation.

First, just a few facts
Delegation is in the very essence of management, since a whole team of people have to do the job. This group has been hired for a very simple reason: one person cannot do the job.
In order to make the teamwork towards the goal and work as one entity, management jobs have been created. Their role is not to do the job but to get the job done. And all the trouble lies in this subtle nuance.

What does make delegation work?
You have hired people to do a job, and that is for this very purpose that you have to supervise them.
You have hired them because there are competent; so do not worry of having them do what you have hired them to do. If you doubt their competence, why did you hire them?
You have lots to supervise and to attend to, so define clearly who does what and who is accountable for as well as by when the job goals must be met. Delegating will save you precious time.
Be very specific about what you expect form your staff.
Give feedback and ask for feedback, when you communicate, be brief and to the point. Your staff expects you to do that. And remember that communicating effectively is not the same as talking/socializing too much.
Be present and walk in on a regular basis. Better many short contacts during which you will immediately hear the most important information than long periods of no contact interrupted by long formal meetings.
When you do this properly, as a manager you will feel fulfilled, you will be happy to go to work, as very likely your team will perform quite well. On the other side, your staff will feel appreciated, will have confident and will take more initiative that will benefit your company and will be loyal.

So what does go wrong with the delegation sport?
What situation do you get when the manager does not delegate properly?
The manager spends more time being involved in his staff’s daily activities. The result is staff frustration and lower motivation. Nobody likes having someone looking over his or her shoulder all the time.
The results of such behaviour are many. The most typical are an overworked manager who loses his ability to look at the big picture, wasting his time in things that would be done anyway (remember? he hired competent people) and getting more and more pressure from his own supervisor, as he is having more and more difficulties to meet the deadlines.
Competent people are not interested in working in a messy environment nor are they interested in having the feeling that their boss does not trust them fully. This will result in higher turnover, which will even increase the workload of the overworked manager.
The main cause of bad delegation is fairly simple: an insecure manager who does not trust others.

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Posted by Christophe Pelletier

Employee turnover, performance indicator of management

April 5, 2009

We all have heard this a million times: employees are the most valuable assets of a company. It sounds great, but in the everyday life, we can see many examples of companies forgetting this nice statement.
So, in the practice, what is the most valuable asset of a company? Did I hear you say it? Yes! Money! Well, this was an easy one, because management reviews the financial weekly and monthly, while they evaluate their employees only once a year, and that is if they ever do. And when they evaluate, in many cases it is only to bring up all the “bad” things they can to discourage the employee to ask for a raise.
Well, this is what mediocre managers do. The good managers know that the quality of financials are a consequence of the quality of the motivation and therefore of the performance of their employees.
Employee turnover is a sign of the quality of the company culture, and this for a simple reason. Why would people leave a company if they are happy and that they are treated fairly? Really, there are not many reasons why they would or should. Most employees would prefer to spend their all lives in the same organization. And most employees go to work with the desire of doing a good job and thus not have any conflict with the boss. Of course, there are always employees who will look to find something somewhere else, but these are a small minority.
The higher the turnover, the lower the morale and the poorer the company culture. For the reasons that I was indicating above about the general employee loyalty and ethics, it will have to take a fair amount of frustration and actually the realization that there is no hope for improvement for an employee to decide to go browse on the job market again. It has been said before, and it is very true: employees do not leave companies, they leave their manager. Ha! That is a good one for you to ponder about when someone leaves your department, isn’t it? Of course, it takes two to tango and there are many reasons why things do not work out the way they should, and maybe another reason for the employee to leave is simply that communicating on the issues at play did not happen. So it also takes two to divorce.
Managers have performance contracts, but these contracts are mostly linked to financial results (the important asset class) and some “non-financial, which in many cases end up to be some interesting project that are never quantified when it comes to their real added-value or degree of difficulty. Very rarely will employee retention (another expression) for employee satisfaction be an integral part of the performance contract.
And this is quite sad, because employee turnover is a plague. It costs a lot, just like it costs a lot to replace a lost customer. First it will cost financially, because the company has to place a job ad, and might have to pay some severance. Then several people in the organization will have to spend time for the selection process and the interviews. Once the new employee is hired, you can be sure that time (time is money) will be spend on training the newcomer, and this period can last up to 6 months, depending on the jobs. Indirectly, it can cost you money too either because people talk and the turnover will eventually give your company a poor reputation and in some cases because the employee who left might attract with him customers away from your company.
Some managers, reading this would say that the turnover is high because they have to fire people. Well, that is another indicator of the quality of the company, as they would not recruit the right people…

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Posted by Christophe Pelletier