The Performance Improvement Blog

Temps Are People, Too

Temps, independent contractors, contingent workers, and free-lancers have become a critical segment of the post-recession workforce. Many companies depend on short-term and part-time workers for their success. They are not movie extras any longer; now they have starring roles. Steven Greenhouse, writing for the New York Times Upshot column describes the situation this way:

The work of temping has changed vastly — today 42 percent of temporary workers labor in light industry or warehouses. And there are more of them. The number of workers employed through temp agencies has climbed to a new high — 2.87 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and they represent a record share of the nation’s work force, 2 percent…

More than five years into a recovery marked by halting growth, many businesses are still adding temp jobs rather than permanent ones. “This is a reflection of business uncertainty, that businesses need to be more responsive, and part of that is keeping their work force flexible,” said Steven Berchem, the chief operating officer of the American Staffing Association.

The problem is that these workers are often not allowed to contribute fully to the work of the organization. They are marginalized and ignored by full-time employees. They aren’t given the training they need to be safe and successful on the job. They aren’t encouraged to become engaged in their work and the organization.

If you want temporary employees to have the best interests of the company in mind, effectively complete essential tasks, some of which require substantial knowledge and skill, and strive to do their best, then they need to be treated with respect and be given the opportunity to do their best work for the good of the organization. As I wrote in a May 2013 post:

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.

Companies can’t afford to have workers, even if only temporary, who are not engaged in their work, who are not properly trained, and who don’t understand the purpose of their jobs and the company. Rather, they need contingent workers who are excited about working in the company and will give their best effort, not simply be a cog in the wheel.

Deliberately Developmental Organizations

Can companies link a high level of business success to the personal growth of every employee?  In the August issue of Harvard Business Review in an article titled, “Making Business Personal”, Robert Kegan, Lisa Lahey, Andy Fleming, and Matthew Miller ask this question and provide evidence that the answer can be “yes”.

The problem, as they define it, is misdirected energy. They write:

To an extent that we ourselves are only beginning to appreciate, most people at work, even in high-performing organizations, divert considerable energy every day to a second job that no one has hired them to do: preserving their reputations, putting their best selves forward, and hiding their inadequacies from others and themselves. We believe this is the single biggest cause of wasted resources in nearly every company today.

I agree with this analysis. People waste much time and energy on “looking good”. Whether high level executive or front-line employee, they want to be considered smart, competent, and infallible to their bosses, to the organization, and to their customers. This is a tremendous burden for any human being to carry. None of us can be nor need be right and successful all the time and in everything we do.

A few successful companies appear to be overcoming this problem. The authors label these businesses “deliberately developmental organizations”. Two examples of DDOs are Bridgewater Associates and Decurion Corporation. These organizations have created cultures in which it is okay to be vulnerable and to grow from that experience. The authors describe the organizations in this way:

These companies operate on the foundational assumptions that adults can grow; that not only is attention to the bottom line and the personal growth of all employees desirable, but the two are interdependent; that both profitability and individual development rely on structures that are built into every aspect of how the company operates; and that people grow through the proper combination of challenge and support, which includes recognizing and transcending their blind spots, limitations, and internal resistance to change. For this approach to succeed, employees (Decurion prefers to call them members) must be willing to reveal their inadequacies at work—not just their business-as-usual, got-it-all-together selves—and the organization must create a trustworthy and reliable community to make such exposure safe. …progress for their employees means becoming not only more capable and conventionally successful but also more flexible, creative, and resilient in the face of the challenges—for both personal and organizational growth—that these companies deliberately set before them.

The challenge facing any organization that wants to become “deliberately developmental” is considerable. Significant work will have to be undertaken by everyone in the organization to create this kind of culture. Susan Palmer describes this challenge:

Creating a deliberately developmental organization is difficult, very time-consuming and demands significant and public growth on the part of the leader(s) of the effort. The kind of vulnerability required to champion this idea, and to demonstrate continuous learning to others as you go, takes profound courage and is not for everyone.

Even more fundamentally, I believe, this kind of organization cannot be created unless leaders believe that employees can learn and change. This attitude of leaders is not a given. Carol Dweck has concluded from her research that people have either a fixed mind-set or a growth mind-set. Unfortunately, many leaders of organizations have a fixed mind-set. This has to change before these companies can become “deliberately developmental organizations”.

What Can Managers Do to Create and Sustain Learning?

Managers in any organization, whether nonprofit, government, or business, play a pivotal role in creating and sustaining learning. They do not have to be instructors nor do they have to be expert in the knowledge and skills needed by their direct reports. However, they do have to believe that people can learn and change, they have to care about their own learning, and they have to value the development of the people they supervise. If they have these beliefs and values, then managers can contribute significantly to learning in their organizations.

In our book, The 5As Framework, Sean Murray and I describe seven steps managers can take to facilitate and support learning of their direct reports:

STEP ONE: Discuss what the learner needs to learn in order to help your business unit achieve its objectives and the organization’s strategic goals.

STEP TWO: Agree on a set of learning objectives for the short-term and long-term.

STEP THREE: Agree on the indicators that will be used to determine progress toward those objectives and achievement of goals.

STEP FOUR: Describe how the learner can get the most out of the learning intervention.

STEP FIVE: Arrange for the learner to get whatever resources he/she needs to apply the learning to your business unit.

STEP SIX: Plan regular meetings (they may be brief) to discuss progress toward objectives and goals and any changes that would help the learner’s progress.

STEP SEVEN: Make modifications in the learning intervention as needed.

Essentially, managers should work with learners to set goals, clarify expectations, provide opportunities for application, and hold them accountable for making a difference. Training professionals can certainly help managers with this, but managers are in best position to facilitate the kind of day-to-day learning that is needed in high performance organizations today.

Learn, Adapt, Innovate

The culture of traditional, hierarchical organizations does not allow for the scope and speed of learning, adaptation, and innovation that is needed to compete and be successful in today’s environment.

Edgar Schein spells out the problem in his chapter in the book, Creating a Learning Culture:

The rate of technological, economic, political, and sociocultural change is increasing, and organizations are, therefore, finding it more and more important to figure out how to adapt.

Adaptation in turbulent environments involves more than minor adjustments. It often requires genuinely innovative thrusts: new missions, new goals, new products and services, new ways of getting things done, and even new values and assumptions. Most important, adaptation involves managing perpetual change. Organizations will have to learn how to learn and to become self-designing.

The difficulty is that organizations are by nature, and often by design, oriented towards stabilizing and routinizing work.

Schein published those words in 2004. The rate of change and the pressure on organizations to quickly adapt to “technological, economic, political, and sociocultural change” has only accelerated since then.

Large, bureaucratic organizations, especially, have cultures that value consistency over variation, predictability over uncertainty, control over freedom, and practicality over creativity. These values become a barrier to individuals, teams, and whole organizations continually learning from what they do and re-designing themselves for success.

Examples abound of companies that were once household names and are now extinct because they did not learn, adapt, and innovate: Compaq; E.F. Hutton; PainWebber; Merry-Go-Round; MCI WorldCom; Eastern Airlines; Enron; Woolworth's; Pan Am; Standard Oil; The Pullman Co.; Arthur Anderson; General Foods Corp; TWA; and DeLorean Motor Co. Of course, many factors contributed to each of their demise but lack of a learning culture played a major role.

As Schein says, when things are not working right in an organization, you have to look at culture, digging down deep to find out why you do things the way you do them. Only then can you determine what needs to change in order to create a culture that supports learning, adaptation, and innovation.