The Performance Improvement Blog

How to Manage Temporary Employees

Temps, independent contractors, contingent workers, and free-lancers have become the norm, not the exception. As I wrote in a post in March 2010:

Unlike previous recession recoveries, this one will not re-employ large numbers of laid off workers. Because of technology, operational efficiencies, a project focus, and out-sourcing, many companies are finding that they can be more productive with fewer employees. And because of uncertainty about the post-recession economy, they are reluctant to make new hires permanent. Employers have found that they can get the job done by supplementing their regular employees with temps. This gives companies the freedom to increase and decrease their workforce depending on what is needed at the time.

The May 10 issue of Crain’s Detroit Business confirms this prediction. The author writes:

Increased consumer demand, a greater need for flexibility and new health-care requirements are prompting businesses from Dearborn-based Ford Motor Co. to the PeaceHealth health-care system in Washington state to turn to staffing firms…The U.S. has added 913,200 temporary workers since the end of the recession in June 2009 – about 19 percent of all new jobs. Their number rose to 2.66 million in April, about 11,300 shy of the April 2000 record, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures released May 3.

Labor economists are predicting that the number of temporary workers will set a new record in the very near future. And this is without including all of the contracted services such as legal, PR, accounting, Web support, employee training, and management consulting.

Are business leaders prepared for this change in the workforce? How will managers help temporary workers maximize their contribution to the organization?  

BusinessWeek labeled them the “disposable worker”, a pejorative term but symptomatic of the way many managers view this segment of employees. This view is based on at least three misconceptions: 1) temporary workers are not committed to the work, they just want a paycheck; 2) temporary workers are not critical to the success of the organization; and 3) it’s not worth investing time, energy, and money in the development of temporary workers.

The truth is that most temporary workers want to do a good job and care deeply about the quality of their work. The work they do is often critical to the success of the organization. And if they are customer-facing, then they are shaping customer attitudes toward the company.

As far as investing in temporary workers, that time, energy, and money will have immediate payoff and, because you never know how long that person will work for the organization or how many times they will come back to the company in the future, it is worth the risk to train and develop that person. When they go elsewhere, they take the goodwill and learning with them which is good for the community and good for the reputation of the organization.

Regardless of how long temporary workers have been with your organization, they should be treated as important contributors to your success. Applying the 5As Framework, here are five things you should keep in mind when supervising these employees:

1)      Make sure that they understand how their jobs are aligned with the success of the organization. They should know how what they are being asked to do contributes to achieving business goals.

2)      Let them know that you anticipate that they will have a positive experience and that their work is significant. Communicate high expectations for their performance.

3)      Form an alliance with them for the purpose of their learning and success. Give them informal and formal feedback on how they are doing and how they can improve.

4)      Create opportunities and give encouragement to apply what they know and what they are learning to their jobs. Being temporary means that it is all that much more urgent to provide these opportunities.

5)      Measure their success and hold them accountable for doing a good job. This means being clear with them about the indicators of success and how you will help them achieve those outcomes.

It is easy to make the mistake of assuming that temporary workers are not the real workforce and do not deserve our full attention. That is, in effect, discarding a large and growing portion of the workers who can make our organizations successful. We need to embrace this segment and apply the same good practices to them that we use to develop any high performing and engaged workforce. 

Survey of Organization Performance Challenges

Leaders today face many challenges in facilitating organization performance improvement. Fifteen of these problems are listed in a survey of organizational performance challenges. The link to this survey follows this paragraph. Please click on the link and take a few minutes now to rank order the items on the list. I think you will find the exercise to be enlightening. If I receive a sufficient number of responses, I will report the results in a future post.

Survey of Organization Performance Challenges

What would you add to this list?

If you wish to find resources that can help you with any of the challenges listed in the survey, go to Learning to be Great. 

Related articles

Organizational Learning Tools

Tools of a Learning Organization

Leader Learning Library

Online resources for leaders and wannabe leaders are quite extensive these days. We are witnessing the democratization of leadership, making the "servant leader" even more possible. Everyone can become a leader (as well as an effective follower) by learning about leadership when and where it is most convenient and applicable.

But it's not easy to find Web links that have been screened for quality and topics. Masters in Leadership has put together 100 Exemplary Sites for Future Leaders. And I have the honor of having my blog included in that list.

One of the very useful features of the list is the categorization of topics. These include:

• Leadership Coaching
• Team Building
• Business Leadership
• Women in Leadership
• General Leadership

While Masters in Leadership has created an excellent resource, that has something for everybody, as with any best-of list, each of us can think of people and organizations that we would have included. For example, I would have selected the sites of Wally Bock and John Baldoni for a hundred-best list. I hope Masters in Leadership continues to monitor the sites on their list and remove and add links as these Web-based sources of information change over time.

 

Lifelong Employee Learning

The Evolllution, in a report titled, Lifelong Education and Labor Market Needs, presents findings that support a key role for post-secondary institutions in educating workers for jobs that have gone unfilled while unemployment remains high, and in continually improving the position of workers within companies. The report’s conclusion states:

Many North Americans have trouble keeping pace with the changes occurring in today’s workplace. Despite the existence of 9.3 million unemployed Americans, the country experienced a shortage of 7 million skilled workers in 2010, a shortage that is expected to climb to 21 million by 2020. A lack of educational attainment sits at the root of the issue. So much so, that unless more North Americans strive to achieve a higher level of education, average income per capita is going to decline within the next decade.

Much of this unemployment is structural. Employers just don’t need as many employees today as they did a few years ago to do the same jobs. Technology and automation have made companies much more efficient. The only hope for workers is to continually upgrade their skills. Alvin Toffler, the futurist, has been quoted as saying, “The illiterate of the 21^st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Colleges and universities will remain one key resource for this learning, unlearning, and relearning.

However, let’s not put all colleges and universities into the same pot. They have different missions, structures, and cultures. For example, large universities are not adept at making quick and timely changes in their curricula to respond to changing needs in a company’s workforce. In my region of the U.S. there is a severe shortage of IT engineers. Companies do not need people with four-year computer science degrees nor do they necessarily need people with two-year, community college degrees. They need people who have had enough education to be able to do the job and solve problems for customers. Some employees might only need a class or two. For others, a two-week “bootcamp” might be all that is necessary. Universities tend not to look at education this way. They are oriented towards the academic year, academic terms, and academic requirements.  These programs are often designed around the intellectual interests of faculty, not around the needs of students and their employers. That’s fine, but this is not what employees need in order to be successful in their work places.

Community colleges, by virtue of their mandates, can be more responsive to the development of workers. Living up to their name, these institutions strive to meet the needs of employers and learners in the communities that they serve. They can add and subtract courses and programs from term to term, and sometimes in shorter time spans, as long as there is a demand from students and there are available instructors (full-time or part-time) to teach the courses.

Universities often have to go through a much longer process to change curricula, sometimes taking several years with required approvals from departments, central administration, and state-level committees. These institutions can be effective partners in employee learning and development, but employers and learners should not assume that every institution can be responsive. Their mission and culture will dictate whether or not they can meet the needs of employees.

For these partnerships between employers and post-secondary institutions to work, employers must demand more cooperation from colleges and universities. And employers must be prepared to encourage and support employees who want to take advantage of this kind of resource.  

I, Robot; You, Learn

Tom Friedman, in his op-ed column in the New York Times yesterday, describes his visit to Rethink Robots, a Boston-area company that develops easy-to-program, safe, low-cost robots for business and personal use. These are not the big, dangerous robots that you only find on the line in large manufacturing plants. These are small robots designed for doing repetitive jobs that low-skilled workers have been doing in all kinds of businesses for more than a century.  

I welcome these new, intelligent machines, especially if they can do jobs that human beings don't want to do. But make no mistake about it; robots will eliminate jobs for humans. They are reliable (with proper maintenance), they don't take breaks, and they don't ask for wage increases and promotions. However, they are a bore at the company party. In any case, they are the future and leaders need to be prepared for how these machines will change the work environment.

Friedman writes:

This is the march of progress. It eliminates bad jobs, empowers good jobs, but always demands more skill and creativity and always enables fewer people to do more things. We went through the same megashift when our agricultural economy was replaced by the industrial economy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

This new robotics "megashift" has huge implications for the workplace. Employers will need workers who are better educated, more willing to change, and more flexible in their schedules and work habits than ever before. These workers won't be needed for simple, repetitive jobs. They will be needed for computer-assisted jobs and for jobs that require creativity, innovation, and teamwork. They will have to be continuous learners, keeping up with technology, globalization, and new ways of organizing work.

Company leaders will need to be able to manage a smarter, more dispersed, more demanding workforce. Change will be (already is) constant. Robots (and computer automation) will be doing the simple, mind-numbing work. Leaders will have to inspire humans to think, learn, improve, and contribute in ways that repetitive work did not allow them to do in the past.

Why Learn?

Why should you keep on learning? You have a college degree, maybe a terminal degree such as MBA or Ph.D. You have a job that you know how to do and you’re good at it. You get a regular paycheck, and, if you’re lucky, have a long-term contract and stock options. Other than your supplier’s new products and services, what is there left to learn?

Learning and work have merged. Izzy Justice, founder and CEO of EQMentor, Inc. writes: “…the successful working professional will not be the one who has accomplished a lot in the past, but the one who is constantly learning.” Whether it’s learning something new, unlearning something old, or learning how to learn, all employees, from front-line technicians to C-suite executives, need to make learning part of their jobs.

You know the trends. Technology is changing the way we work and putting information literally at our fingertips. Globalization is changing where we work and who are our competitors; they could be anywhere in the world and could crop up overnight. A demand for transparency in all institutions has made a high degree of ethics and compliance an essential part of doing business. Expectations of corporate leaders is to do more with less which means that employees need to be smarter about their jobs and how they do them.  Networking using social media is breaking down silos and building options for sharing information and know-how but it also is a capability that needs to be developed.

These trends are putting pressure on all employees for continually acquiring new knowledge and skills. Tim Hoff, of American Trainco, offers these eight reasons for continuous learning:

1. To enhance skills, especially those not fully developed in school or prior experience.

2. To provide job security by increasing value to company

3. To increase career options within and outside current employer

4. To improve adaptability to changes in organization and industry

5. To achieve more professional success

6. To have higher job satisfaction

7. To increase income

8. To stay current with industry trends and best practices

Vincent Belliveau, general manager at Cornerstone OnDemand, links continuous learning to employee engagement, which, he argues, results in greater productivity, reduced turnover, and a better company reputation. This link between employee engagement and company success appears to be supported by research.

Andres Fortino of DeVry College of New York, writing in The Evolllution, makes the distinction between training and education. Learners will benefit from both training and education. He writes: “To keep up and to advance it is imperative that professionals engage in some form of continuing education or they will soon find themselves less in demand.”

The solution is creating a culture of learning in organizations that utilizes external education courses, workplace formal training, workplace informal training, and opportunities for feedback and reflection that help employees learn from their workplace activity. Organizations need to support continuous learning continuously. The key to this is having managers who encourage, facilitate, and reward learning by their direct reports.

 

Do You Need a CCO and CLO?

Should your organization have a CCO and CLO? Paul Hebert argues against organizations appointing a Chief Culture Officer.

Hebert writes:

…as soon as you codify, quantify and assign responsibility to something it ceases to be everyone’s responsibility…Culture is a defined as a set of shared values, behaviors, norms.  Shared.  Operative word.  Shared means we all have a part in the outcome and the input…If you create a job called “Culture Chief” you’ve just provided a backdoor for every manager, every employee to use as their personal escape route when culture starts to go wrong at your company.

I agree with Hebert and I have similar concerns with having a CLO (Chief Learning Officer). Learning is what employees in high performance organizations must do continuously as part of their jobs. Companies don’t have CWOs (Chief Work Officer), so why do they have CLOs? I suspect CEOs appoint CCOs and CLOs because it makes them feel like they are doing something about the work environment and employee development. The risk is that responsibility for employee engagement and learning will be relegated to a department and not owned by every executive, manager, and employee in the organization.

For a long time, organizations have built a department around training and given it a director in order to give it status and to protect it from the budgetary absorption of other units. The unintended consequence has been to reinforce the notion that work and learning are separate and that one has higher value than the other when, in fact, the success of the organization depends on continuous learning. To break out of this mental model, companies should stop doing things that appear to centralize responsibility for learning. Don’t put all the emphasis on a course catalogue and don’t hire a CLO.

I see the need for a CFO and a CIO. They are leaders of operational areas that require specialized focus on managing, maintaining, and improving systems that support those operations. Those areas need a voice at the executive table. But culture and learning are who we are and how we work collectively. They should be nurtured and actively fostered daily by everyone. 

On the other hand, any kind of major change in an organization needs a champion. Employees want a face on actions that affect the way they do their work and how they are rewarded. They are more likely to commit to doing things differently and going in a different strategic direction if they believe that the leadership of the organization fully endorses the new direction.   A credible, respected leader that frequently reminds people of the change can play a key role in ensuring that the change happens and that it sticks. Also, it’s good to see the visibility for culture and learning that comes with appointment of a person in those positions. However, if sole responsibility for the change rests with that leader, it will not be sustained over time. Eyes will roll every time that person opens his or her mouth. A high performance culture and continuous employee learning will not become woven into the fabric of the organization.

Change in culture, such as transforming an organization from high fear to high trust, has to be done collectively and requires that everyone in the organization accept responsibility for doing things differently and recognizing and rewarding people differently. Change in learning, such as managers forming an alliance with their direct reports around learning and performance improvement, also requires shared responsibility and mutual support for doing things quite differently. Learning is everybody’s business whether at the individual, team, or organization level.

Leadership for culture and learning should come from CEOs. It’s their job to set the strategic direction for the organization and ensure that the organization is aligned with that direction. Culture and learning are the foundation for that alignment. I understand the desire of CEOs to departmentalize those roles, but the downside risk is significant. 

 

The 0% Solution to Learning

Ideally, organizations should be striving for a culture in which every aspect of the workplace supports continuous individual, team, and whole organization learning. It should be a place where Individuals are learning how to help the organization achieve its strategic goals, where teams are learning how to help the organization achieve its strategic goals, and where the organization as a whole is learning how to achieve its strategic goals.

In this kind of culture, formal classroom training is superfluous. The most important learning occurs in the conversations that employees have with their supervisors and co-workers, in the conversations that teams have about team development and effectiveness, and in whole organization experiences with problem solving and planning. Learning occurs from the feedback and reflection around individual, team, and whole organization successes and failures. Learning occurs because of a performance management system that permeates every aspect of organizational life, not because of isolated instructor-based courses, workshops, and seminars.

Robert O. Brinkerhoff makes this point in his writing about measuring the contribution that training makes to learning and performance improvement. He argues that the isolation score, that indicator of how much training contributes to performance results, should be zero. He writes:

An isolation score of zero, on the other hand, seems to me to be the perfect solution: it means the organization has figured out a way to drive a desired performance improvement and resultant business result solely by manipulating the performance system, so there is no need for any training at all. Isn't this scenario exactly what the performance-oriented practitioners would seek? Training is always an expensive solution. If you can get to the desired business outcome without spending a dime on training - by just adjusting incentives, motivation, performance support, etc. - isn’t this what a thoughtful HRD leader should strive for?

The implication of striving for an “isolation score of zero” is that the whole organization owns learning, not just HR and the CLO, and when the organization needs performance improvement, training is not the first course of action. We have to change the way we think about learning and performance improvement, especially as people need to learn faster and achieve better results.

Unfortunately, it’s a very difficult mental model to change. In a recent post on ASTD’s Learning Circuits Blog, Connie Malamed asks, “What do you think the future role of the training professional will be?” She offers this model of future roles:

Malamed's model is an accurate representation of the current state of things but not where I think the field needs to go in the future. My model would not include “design and create courses.” My model would put “align learning with the strategic goals of the organization” at the center and “create a culture of learning throughout the organization” as the next key role. We have so many learning support options now, including just-in-time elearning (desktop and mobile), coaching, mentoring, simulations, on-demand video, experiential learning, internships, and on and on, that we rarely need to develop courses. Learning and development professionals need to be focused on performance results, not on training. 

 

Performance Management is Broken

What is intended to pass for performance management in too many organizations today is the annual compulsory performance review. To label this a “performance management system” is to give the process much more credit than it deserves. A perfunctory meeting between a manager and employee once a year to review a standard rating sheet that lists competencies and goals that are probably no longer relevant is not a performance management system.

Elaine Pulakos and Ryan O’Leary have recently published a well-documented paper in Industrial and Organizational Psychology that explains the strengths and weaknesses of common approaches to annual reviews (Elaine D. Pulakos and Ryan S. O’leary, Why Is Performance Management Broken? Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 4 (2011), 146–164.). They examine: 1) linking individual employee goals to overall organizational goals; 2) setting SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound) performance goals for each employee; 3) rating performance on a list of pre-defined competencies; and 4) collecting, analyzing, and reporting performance data from multiple sources, such as co-workers, customers, and supervisors. I would add one more: ranking individuals according to their managers' opinions  of their performance (observed or not). The authors didn't include "ranking" in their study probably because they can't believe any organization would actually use such a disruptive method as its performance management system. 

Each of these common approaches sounds good in theory. What could be wrong with aligning goals, having SMART objectives, being judged on the basis of needed competencies, and getting evaluative data from multiple sources (triangulation)? The problem according to Pulakos and O’Leary is in implementation of each method over time. Follow-through is highly time-consuming, is inconsistently applied, and relies too heavily on subjective and capricious ratings of managers. The alternative, according to the authors, is to improve the on-going manager-employee relationship. They write:

…concerns on the part of managers and employees prevent formal performance management systems from working well and have turned them into largely administrative drills that add little value. Contributing to this is the fact that performance management implementations tend to focus on rolling out formal administrative processes and tools (e.g., competency models, rating scales, and automated systems) rather than training managers and employees how to engage in effective performance management behavior (e.g., setting expectations, providing feedback, and helping staff solve problems). However, it is the informal process of engaging in these behaviors day-to-day that determines performance management effectiveness, not the tools and steps that comprise the formal system. (p. 148)

They recommend that organizations stop installing new performance management systems and start paying greater attention to manager-employee relationships. They cite a study by the Corporate Leadership Council that found that managers, not performance management systems, were the key to improving employee performance.

The results revealed that specific manager behaviors are some of the most important drivers of performance. These include (a) helping employees understand what they are expected to do in sufficient detail to deliver it, (b) supporting and helping employees find solutions to problems, (c) playing to employees’ strengths rather than their weaknesses by giving them assignments they can do well, (d) developing employees productively by finding a balance between acknowledging strengths and contributions and addressing development needs, and (e) engaging in regular, informal performance conversations in which managers provide feedback that is fair, accurate, and helps employees do a better job.

In essence, performance management depends on effective communication and trust between managers and employees. A "learning alliance" must form between them in order for both to contribute fully to the organization.  If the purpose of performance management is for managers to check off that an annual performance review has been completed for compliance purposes, then one of the four common approaches identified by Pulakos and O’Leary will do just fine. However, if the purpose is to improve performance, then the focus must be on the quality of manager-employee relationships.  (For examples of effective communication and trust-building, see Communication in High Performance Organizations: Principles and Best Practices.)

 

The Course Catalog Is (Should Be) Dead

Recently, I was asked a very thought-provoking question by the director of HRD for a large organization. I was explaining the “5As Framework” to her and she asked, “What are the implications for what we do here?” I immediately launched into my usual speech about getting managers of learners
involved in actively supporting the learning process. This led to a discussion of all the excuses she hears from managers to explain their lack of involvement in employee learning. It wasn’t until later, after further rumination, that I realized the better answer to the director’s question is, “Throw out the course catalog!” 

Like HRD departments in many large organizations, each year they offer a long list of courses and programs that have all of the current buzz words in their titles. I have no doubt that her department delivers excellent, world-class courses and programs. And I’m sure employees enjoy the courses and even say that the knowledge and skills will be very useful to them in their work. However, I’m also quite sure that very little has changed in the wider organization as a result of the many outstanding events put on by this unit. The problem is the lack of alignment between event-based instruction and important business results.

The competency model, which provides the underlying theory of event-based training, is doing a disservice to the current needs of organizations. Training and development professionals seem to believe that if they can identify the competencies that people need in order to do their jobs and then offer courses to teach those competencies, employees will be more productive and successful. The problem with this way of thinking is that performance has as much (if not more) to do with work culture as it does with job competencies. To be successful, employees need supervisors and co-workers who are supportive of learning and performance improvement, they need a supervisor/boss/mentor who talks to them regularly about learning and results, they need the opportunity to apply new learning and to receive feedback, and they and the organization need to be held accountable for learning and results. If there is this culture of learning, employees will continually improve performance.

According to my colleague, Ralph Jacobson, we have to change the local environment so that people actually “work differently”, not just learn how to work differently. All the courses in the world will not change behavior and improve results unless the local culture supports change. At one time, when jobs were static and organizational change came slowly, a menu of well-designed courses was sufficient. Now, when change has to happen rapidly, when we have to find ways to lower the cost of learning, and when we have better and better online, just-in-time, mobile learning resources, event-based learning is no longer the best answer.

We must provide learning experiences to people when and where they need it and in ways that optimizes application to achieving important business results. We need training and development that is timely, short duration, and project-focused. We need frequent on-the-job feedback from supervisor/boss/mentor to employee. For example, leadership skills are best taught during a challenging, team project while the leader is trying out new behaviors and receiving ongoing feedback from a coach. This way of learning will have much more impact on performance than a course or conference on leadership.

What do you think? Can we throw out the course catalog?