Leading Change in Difficult times: time to think afresh?
September 16, 2011 by Simon Oates (Admin)
Filed under Problem Solving
The events in world markets over July and August have dashed hopes for many in the world of business for a quick end to these recessionary times. Companies in every sector, public, private, big and small are having to rethink costs and efficiencies.
The big danger is a return to the slash and burn tactics characteristic of earlier recessions. Indeed if one were to believe the pronouncements of many public sector institutions post the comprehensive spending review, the approach is becoming increasingly commonplace.
However well intentioned, this arbitrary technique will no doubt achieve its intended cost savings but almost inevitably will be accompanied by long term disruption and an attendant damage to morale and motivation. Not the ideal recipe for recovery.
Is there an alternative to this painful process? Sadly no-one can say for sure as it really depends on the degree of difficulty and the timeframe/urgency facing the organisation. However that should not excuse management from at least looking at other options.
At Leyland Trucks in the late eighties/early nineties it was evident that years of traditional slash and burn had left their mark on the company. A new route was pioneered and termed Team Enterprise. Today this would be regarded as a fusion of best practice employee engagement alongside increasingly sophisticated continuous improvement approaches.
Despite its evident simplicity, the technique served Leyland well, reversing the travails of almost two decades. With little in the way of investment, over £10m a year was shaved off operating costs within eighteen months alongside step changes in productivity, efficiency and quality in all aspects of business performance. Within three years it attained best in Europe status.. Reassuringly the company has continued to practice the technique to world class performance levels, as its recent claim (August 2011) to be only the third UK company to win the prestigious Shingo bronze medal demonstrates.
The transferability of the technique has been repeatedly proven over the years with scores of organisations as diverse as education (European EFQM winner Runshaw College), health (award winning Blackpool Victoria Hospital) and the bakery industry (retail brand giants Warburton’s).
Part of the approach has been given a welcome fillip with the publication in 2009 of the Macleod report on employee engagement. Here the authors David Macleod and Nicky Clarke dismissed concerns that this was some Human Resources driven flavour of the month and instead revealed it to be a genuinely potent tool in the fight to achieve competitiveness. Since then David and Nicky have worked tirelessly to get UK Limited to adopt the practice, endorsed by Prime Minister Cameron no less..
One of its big problems is that everybody thinks they know instinctively what employee engagement is all about. For most it is all about motherhood and apple pie, something nice and fluffy which lies on the periphery of managerial duties. Even a cursory examination of the companies named above would reveal this to be grossly inaccurate. In reality, many of those in charge of companies believe they know all about engaging employees but very few actually get it. Sadly if often takes a Eureka moment of almost Damascene proportions before the penny drops.
The secret to effective employee engagement seems to be the capability in implementing a step change in the perceived management paradigm. Note the emphasis on perception; it is not enough to change. The workforce has to see it, and believe it.
At Leyland a comprehensive programme was put in place to ensure that the shift in management behaviour was real and comprehensive. This meant working simultaneously on all levels of management with the executive team visibly leading the charge. The elements of that change look relatively straightforward:
-a complete review of all vehicles of communication to ensure the management message was delivered in a form which best suited the targeted audience. This included content, delivery and upward flow.
-the use of simple subordinate appraisal techniques to allow managers at all levels to self-develop
-coaching and mentoring where appropriate
-extensive use of simple recognition systems
The emphasis from day one was on simplicity and transparency. This was vital. Finding the key to motivating and engaging employees on a grand scale is not easy and overcomplicating the machinery can easily obscure the underlying objectives.
But simple doesn’t mean easy. The greatest challenge was for those in positions of authority to realise and acknowledge their weaknesses and to admit that, in all probability, they themselves had contributed to the chronic dysfunctionality which surrounded them.
And therein lies the great weakness of employee engagement. It has to start and continue from the top. Many at Board level find this too uncomfortable or indigestible. According the process is delegated to perhaps HR or the Quality department where it will eventually and invariably fail.
For those who go down this path and accept responsibility and accountability, the rewards can be enormous, even transformational. Concerns about continuous improvement can also be set aside. There is no need for great sophistication initially. Simply prioritise basic Kaizen tools, particularly those suitable for simple analysis such as process mapping, Pareto, fishbone diagrams and so on. The Crosby or Six Sigma techniques can follow on down stream at a much later date if so desired. The key initially is to get a significant proportion of the workforce working in small, time based and facilitated focus groups.
The other great fallacy about this approach to improving performance is that it is best done in kinder times, not the turmoil that we are currently facing. In fact the reverse is true. Employees, like managers, read the papers. They know what is going on. It is far better to involve them in the above manner in responding to external challenges than to simply launch painful management initiatives without any real sense of ownership. The Burning Bridge can often be your best asset.
For those who doubt the power of team enterprise, or employee engagement as it is more commonly described nowadays, I recommend reading the Macleod report. There is another way for you and somewhere in those pages lies a solution.
Professor John J Oliver OBE, an Ambassador for the Chartered Management Institute.
Insurance Premiums Still On The Rise: Why Must Some Spoil It For Everyone?
July 19, 2011 by Simon Oates (Admin)
Filed under Problem Solving
In the past year alone car insurance premiums have risen nearly 40%, and a recent BBC Panorama investigation uncovered how ‘crash for cash’ criminals are contributing towards these steep hikes.
Infiltrating a ring of ‘crash for cash’ criminals, Panorama lifted the lid on gangs being paid to crash people’s cars who then file substantial insurance claims for tens of thousands of pounds.
According to the Insurance Fraud Bureau, around 30 000 accidents per year are staged or induced, costing around £350m per year.
With compensation culture in the UK still spreading, personal injury claims from motor accidents have risen 40% in the past four years, many of which for whiplash, a range of injuries to the neck commonly caused by motoring accidents, that do not show up on x-rays or scans.
According to LV= life insurance, 57% of solicitors believe there has been a rise in exaggerated injuries in the past ten years, and 40% have seen a rise in attempted ‘fakers’ since the beginning of the recession. 89% believe that the ‘no win no fee’ system has encouraged more people to make fraudulent personal injury claims.
Looking at LV= life insurance quotes, the rise in personal injury claims and costs has now added £100 onto the average car insurance premium.
So how do we move forward and recover from this chain reaction of rising claims and insurance premiums? The government is considering changing the ‘no win no fee’ system, by making claimants liable for their own legal costs, which has the potential to help to filter out false and exaggerated claims and perhaps slow down the increasing rate of claims being made. But will that resonate with insurance companies and let them stop their premiums from continuing to skyrocket? Watch this space.
Importance of Protecting Interlectual Property
June 29, 2011 by Simon Oates (Admin)
Filed under Problem Solving
If you follow the tech blogs and new wires, you’ll be very familiar with the law suits raised in silicon valley and other tech hubs every month in relation to patents and intellectual property. By intellectual property, I of course am not referring to real estate, which my recent article on Financial Expert: How to Invest in Property is concerned with.
On the contrary, investing in intellectual property requires a different type of capital: human capital, and smart human capital at that. Whilst conquering the global manufacturing stage, China has faced attacks on it’s lack of imagination and invention used by their workforce.
For small tech start-ups, intellectual property is almost the product itself. Often a patented concept, or a specific method of manufacturing can made designs possible that were previously cast from creative rooms on feasibility grounds. Thus, the right piece of intellectual property can propel a small business into a temporary monopoly, sometimes on a global scale. In such cases, it seems only natural that young CEOs have been fighting to the death in the court room to protect their profits.
However recently a new wave of suits have emerged, accusing large established giants of infringing on patents several years ago, before the mega success of the alleged infringer. One could argue that in such cases, the claimant is merely trying to piggy-back off the success of its rival, to compensate for the lack of success it has been generating internally. A case in point is Nokia v Apple Corporation, which recently settled on behalf of Nokia, who successfully argued that Apple had stolen some of their technology in producing the hugely successful iPhone.
The verdict in favour of Nokia, appeared to vindicate the CEO Stephen Elop, who could now officially blame the failure of his company, at least in in part, upon the unscrupulous and leaching activities of its competitors.
This legal triumph does concern me that a secondary wave of action may be launched, a wave of cases that were only spurred on by Nokia’s success, and have far less merit. Such time wasting and resource draining activities are great for the law profession, but damaging to an industry attempting to create their own bids to overthrow a new tyrant.
I believe that protecting intellectual property is important, but should be done on a timely basis when commercially viable and merit. In an industry where the talent pools flow endlessly between enough, it will be very difficult for leaders to ‘protect’ all the knowledge generated in the company, and instead they should focus on capitalising on innovation when it does occur, rather than taking a back seat and watching as a competitor takes the exact same technology and beats them round the head with it.
The Digital Revolution: Document Management
December 24, 2010 by Simon Oates (Admin)
Filed under Problem Solving
I thought I’d write today a short report on a silent revolution that is taking place in the way businesses are being managed at the ‘back end’.
If you’re a manager in a large company, you will probably be familiar with document management solutions. This describes the effective management of digital information. Such services can be outsourced or in-sourced (depending on organisation size) but regardless of the implementation, this area is fantastic at slashing admin costs and efficiency, particularly in finance departments.
“But naturally” you quip, “my ERP/Operating System may be a little buggy or annoying, but overall it manages our digital information perfectly fine, so why is this a ‘new’ and revolutionary idea?”
The answer lies in exactly what counts as digital information. 10 years ago, there was a clear divide between paperwork, and electronic information. However in today’s business environment, the line doesn’t even exist anymore. Digitisation companies can literally come in and scan your entire archive of invoices, orders and delivery notes onto your server. For your admin team, searching through filing cabinets becomes literally a thing of the past.
But such improvements don’t just save the fingertips of admin staff; they also improve the customer experience. Having near-instant access to customer forms and information will enable customer service reps to handle far more queries at the time of a call, rather than having to ‘get back to the customer’, which is inefficient and harms goodwill.
Such is the fast paced world of today, that many managers will digitalise their documents without giving much thought to the massive shift in the type of office work performed by administrative and technical staff as a result. With the acceleration of technological advancement at the speed it is, perhaps it is good that managers are not fazed by such a change!
Calculate Debt Management Payments
November 23, 2010 by Simon Oates (Admin)
Filed under Problem Solving
I believe that being a responsible leader requires a ‘reasonable’ grasp of finance concepts, so this week the money-wise folk at ThinkMoney.com impart advice on managing debts for the finance section of our leadership blog. ~ Simon Oates.
How much you pay on a debt management plan will depend on what you can afford. You’ll be expected to repay your debts as quickly as you can, so any money you have left after bills and other essential expenses each month will go towards your debt management plan.
To work this out you’ll need to put together a budget plan.
Budget plan
A budget plan is simply a record of all your income and outgoings. So you will need to note down what you earn after tax (basic earnings plus any regular bonuses or commission, as well as other income like benefits), and then how much money needs to go out of your account each month. At this point, don’t include payments to your unsecured debts – you just want to note down all your essential expenses and secured debts, such as mortgage payments.
So, a basic budget plan might look like this*:
INCOME
Monthly salary after tax: £1,250
Child benefit: £200
TOTAL: £1,450
OUTGOINGS
Rent payments: £500
Energy bills: £110
Water: £20
Broadband: £20
Landline: £15
Mobile phone: £15
Food costs: £300
Home insurance: £20
Travel costs: £150
TOTAL: £1,150
Your income (£1,450) minus your outgoings (£1,150) leaves you with £300 a month to put towards your unsecured debts.
Let’s assume your unsecured debt repayments should be £500, which means you’re £200 short. As long as your lenders accept it, a debt management plan would reduce this to £300, which you could afford. Note that making smaller payments can affect your credit rating and can cost you more in interest in the long run – although lenders often agree to freeze interest when someone’s on a debt management plan.
Then comes the question of how much you pay to each lender.
Splitting your available income between your unsecured lenders
The fairest and most common way of dividing your available income between your unsecured lenders is on a ‘pro rata’ basis. Here’s a simple explanation:
The £300 you can afford each month must be split between five lenders according to how much you owe each of them. You owe £10,000 in total.
Lender A is owed £3,000 (30% of total debt)
Lender B is owed £2,400 (24%)
Lender C is owed £2,000 (20%)
Lender D is owed £2,000 (20%)
Lender E is owed £600 (6%)
TOTAL = £10,000
Your available £300 would normally be split using the same percentages, so you’d pay £90, £72, £60, £60 and £18 respectively.
However, it’s not always as simple as this. Sometimes a lender might ask for more, which would mean there would be less available for the other lenders. This can make things complicated, which is one reason many people prefer to use the services of a debt management company, who can carry out negotiations on your behalf.
* Please note that these figures have been simplified / rounded to make the example clearer.
How To Avoid Information Overload – Case Study
December 30, 2009 by Simon Oates (Admin)
Filed under Problem Solving
Information overload represents one of the greatest threats to a CEO’s productivity. The purpose of having a single, commanding ‘leader’ such as a managing director or CEO is to ensure that one mind has the ‘big picture’ of the company or project is sound. If the same leader becomes bogged down with day-to-day micromanagement of information and reporting, the consequences can be disastrous. However, if a leader chooses to select precisely the right information, success can be achieved.
Case Study Example: TheCarConnection.com
TheCarConnection.com is a car information website, containing for example, details of 2010 Volvo and Chevy HHR specs. Typing in a vehicle model such as Cadillac SRX will bring up reviews of the car, as well as detailed specifications and photo galleries. This serves as an excellent example of a vast quantity of information, that I can use to explain a leadership tip. The website contains all information you could possibly want in deciding whether to buy a car or not.
If you were a CEO in this situation, instead of approaching the website in a hands on way, looking through the pictures, expert reviews specifications etc one by one, you should assign subordinates to do so and report back to you in a way that will make comparison quick and easy. In TheCarConnection’s case, the format of the website itself actually makes it easy to compare vehicles, but in the real world – saving yourself time at the top can really pay dividends in the long term.
How To Avoid Distractions
April 8, 2009 by Simon Oates (Admin)
Filed under Problem Solving
There are many distractions that we face each day. From televisions to telephones; from computers to fax machines, it seems like there is no end in sight. It’s a wonder that we ever accomplish anything on a daily basis! Nowhere else is this especially true than when we are at work or are trying to get work done. At some point, we will all work in an office environment that is too noisy and is filled with distractions such as client meetings, phone calls, lunch breaks, coffee breaks, office gossip and technological malfunctions. So, considering all of this, how do we maintain our productivity?
Perhaps the most important part of being a productive person is being able to stay focused on the task at hand. Just the other weekend, I was reading a book at the kitchen table while some people were watching the television a few feet away from me. The television was blasting at full volume when someone approached me and asked me how I was able to concentrate on a book with all of the noise. I simply told them that I was shutting the noise out in order to focus. Being able to shut out distractions isn’t something that comes naturally to most people. It takes some measure of practice to be able to put into action. There are many ways that you can increase your work productivity. Let’s start with your desk area. If you’ve ever heard the motto “simplicity is better,” then you should pay attention. Simple is always better. Clear any clutter from your desk area because clutter equals distraction. If you are not a neat person by nature, this will take some effort, and you may want to get a more organized person to help you out at first. Invest in a small filing cabinet or desk file organizer. Put loose pens, pencils and paperclips in an appropriate holder. Even the number of sticky notes should be minimized. Instead, try to write messages to yourself in a small notepad that can be left on your desk in an inconspicuous area. There are also software programs available, which can set up audio alerts or pop-up alerts to let you know of something that is due or that you need to be reminded of.
On your computer desktop, create folders to help you organize information. Your computer desktop background should have no more than one vertical line’s worth of folders and/or other information on it. Try to keep all of your files tucked away, off of your desktop. Yes, you can minimize clutter on your computer! Regarding your email, creating filters is key. Creating email filters will help you more quickly sort through what needs to be read first versus having to scan through emails to find important information. Also make sure you set up your spam filters accordingly and occasionally check your spam folder to make sure that it is functioning properly. If you work in a small office that is chatty, try approaching the source of the chatter outside of the office or separately so as to not embarrass that person. If you feel uncomfortable, then approach your supervisor about the situation so that it may be resolved. Stay focused, keep things simple, and you should have no problem being more productive!
Guest Author: Brenda Williams
http://www.wakeforlaw.com
