Employee Added Value

Organisations need to liberate Employee Performance.

This newsletter, 'People-centric and Strategic HR' is about a new multi-sided model for HR. In the last edition of the newsletter, I suggested that organisations need to add value to their employees, helping them to perform, and improving business performance. This edition starts to review how this value can be added.

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Employee Value for Money

Today’s employee experience approaches are important enablers for helping employees to create value (CV+), and by enabling this, improving business performance. However, from an employee perspective, much of this activity is just value for money for them (E-VfM).

Most people don’t go to work for a good experience at work, so whilst everything we’re doing on employee experience is appropriate and useful, it’s not really ever going to have much impact on employees’ motivation, performance, customer experience or business results.

Employee experience is necessary but not sufficient – today, we need to add value to employees too.

Employee Added Value

In my last newsletter, I defined adding value, in any context, as meeting the specific requirements of a client / customer / other stakeholder. So it’s less about the general best practices of the value for money level, and more about the unique challenges of a particular scenario.

From a strategic HR perspective, adding value (AV) is about understanding the needs of a business and supporting it by providing outcomes or capabilities in people and their organisation, which is then delivered through appropriate HR activities and interventions. Because it’s still about supporting a business, adding value isn’t being truly strategic, but is a hugely important part of being a more effective business function.

From a people-centric HR perspective, I now suggesting that employee added value (E-AV) needs to be about how we help employees to meet their work objectives.

I know that this isn’t a new need, and is obviously something we already emphasise in order to ensure the overall objectives of a business are met. For example, although from a strategic perspective, I often break organisation outcomes down as human, organisation and social capital, I also like the AMO model’s categorisation as ability, motivation and opportunity to participate. It’s often that opportunity that’s lacking, and I’ve long thought we’ve fallen short in addressing it.

Returning again to our current people-centric perspective, this same issue is seen in the way that many people still believe that their organisation often hinders rather than helps them to perform.

Liberating Employees from their Organisation

I first came across the idea about HR as ‘human liberation’ as a suggestion from Sir John Harvey Jones in a talk to an HR network, Exchange, that I used to run back in the 1990s. However, I first started to really look at the way organisations hobble their people’s performance after reading Boston Consulting Group consultant Yves Morieux’s HBR article in 2011, ‘Smart rules: six ways to get people to solve problems without you’. I thought these findings were quite shocking back then:

“Complexity has grown substantially meaning that the opportunities for re-engineering are even more pronounced. This can be seen in BCG’s analysis of 100 US and European listed companies, which found that over a 15-year period the amount of complexity assessed by the number of layers, coordination bodies and decision approvals needed had grown by 50–350%. Managers can now spend up to 40% of their time writing management reports and another 30% in coordination meetings.”

I also thought this graphic from Adobe Workfront’s State of Enterprise research in 2016 was quite powerful (the graphic was included a good BBC video on David Graeber’s work, which also links to the negative perception many people have their jobs) - I use it in the Academy's Work and Job Design programme:

In ‘Time, Talent, Energy’, Bain consultants summarise the various issues described here as 'organisational drag' and suggest that in addition to 15% of an organisation’s time being spent in meetings, senior executives can spend 40% of their time in them, with up to 25% of all this time being unnecessary.

More recently, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini have suggested the problem is ‘bureausclerosis’ and that this can be measured though a bureaucracy mass index based on the following seven issues:

1. Bloat: too many managers, administrators, and management layers
2. Friction: too much busy work that slows down decision making
3. Insularity: too much time spent on internal issues
4. Disempowerment: too many constraints on autonomy
5. Risk Aversion: too many barriers to risk taking
6. Inertia: too many impediments to proactive change
7. Politics: too much energy devoted to gaining power and influence.

Gartner also note the impact of what they call 'work friction' based on the sort of issues shown in the slide below, suggesting that:

• 74% of employees experience 3 or more work friction points
• 26% experience 7 or more work friction points - accounting for a 31% drop in intent to stay
• Hybrid and remote employees are 40% more likely to experience high levels of work friction.

Gartner also predict designing organisations to address both this and employee change fatigue will be HR's second highest priority for 2023:

Note that all these areas go beyond just a nice experience. They're also issues that stop people doing their work as effectively as they could do, and most often would like to.

Reducing Organisational Debt

The problem has also recently been referred to as organisational debt – the idea that the cost of not developing organisations to enable employees to perform to their potential has been growing over time, a bit like the cost of investing in short-term technological fixes, ie technical debt.

For me, some of the potential actions to reduce all the problems listed above are relatively simple. For example:

• Reducing meetings. Many organisations run far too many meetings. I wrote this post on meetings just before the pandemic, but the problem has increased substantantially since then – firstly, during the pandemic, as we weren’t able to meet in the traditional way. And secondly, since then, in the new hybrid environment, where I think we’ve largely failed to adapt to the constraints and opportunities of the new hybrid working environment.
• Reducing email. We’ve known for a good decade or more that email is a fairly poor tool for many types of communication, but other than in a very small number of organisations, it remains ubiquitous. Now that so many companies use Microsoft Teams, we could reduce both email overload and the latest and maybe baddest contribution to bureausclerosis which is Teams sprawl, by much more effective use of our communication and collaboration systems.
• Increasing asynchronous communication. A large part of both solutions above is to move to more asynchronous communication. Businesses can be much more effective when they allow people to work in their own time at their own rate, and this is an essential basis for a move to much broader flexible working (one of the ‘basics’ from my last newsletter).

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However, other actions do require more fundamental change. These centre largely on radically increasing employee autonomy. I’ll provide an overview of what may be possible here in my next newsletter, providing part 2 of this article on employee added value.

However, remember that all of this is still only one, if a major part of how we can progress beyond today’s focus on employee experience. Therefore, once I’ve outlined how we can liberate employees by increasing their autonomy, we’ll move on to review the next step of employee created value (E-CV) too.

I’d love to hear your own views on the points I've made above.?Please share your comments below. I look forward to discussing these and broader points around multi-sided HR with you! Also, please subscribe for future insights on multi-sided HR.

I also invite you to check out my broader insights on both strategic and people-centric HR in the Strategic HR Academy. Learn about the latest thinking and opportunities in on-demand courses on HR and Competitive Advantage; Performance Management and Reward; Organisation, Process, Work and Job Design; Strategic Partnering and HR Transformation. Then discuss application within your own organisation with me and other HR practitioners in periodic study groups (The 2023 Strategic Priorities study group is starting shortly!).

Kind regards - Jon