MEETING TODAY’S PERFORMANCE CHALLENGES

MEETING TODAY’S PERFORMANCE CHALLENGES

MEETING TODAY’S PERFORMANCE CHALLENGES
MEETING TODAY’S PERFORMANCE CHALLENGES

What is your organization’s greatest internal asset? The right answer: the people who work for your organization. But the workforce and today’s market pressures place great demands on that assets today. Here are some of the most important imperatives facing workers today.

Provide higher-quality goods and services.

Quality programs are omnipresent today, as organizations are increasingly finding that quality goods and services are the key to long-term survival in the marketplace.  But some companies say the right things about quality without simultaneously giving their employees the means or incentives to improve the quality of their performance. 

Serve customers better

Excellence in serving customers has become another key to success in this decade.  But ask yourself these questions: when you talk today to, let us say, a customer service representative, how positive are you that you’ve gotten the right answer? If you call back and talk to a different representative, do you think you’ll get the same answer? As products and services have become more complex, many workers are becoming overwhelmed by the amount of information they must know or have access to in order to serve customers adequately.

Perform tasks right the first time

The demand placed on organizations because of time compression and quality standards dictate that workers be given the support to do things right the first time, rather than reach high performance levels slowly, over time.

Perform a broader, more complex range of tasks 

The time when organizations could have many categories of worker, each becoming an expert in one area or small number of areas, is over. Workers must have diverse skills to perform diverse tasks.

Reduce costs of supervision and quality control

Employee-to-supervisor ratios are rising steeply. Workers must be given the power and the support to be self-motivated and self-directing.

Cope with continuous change

The pace of change in the marketplace continues to rise. Organizations must provide their workers with the means to assimilate change, or the entire organization will suffer.

Attain proficiency quickly, and sustain it continuously

On-going employee education and training are critical to the success of an organization. Or at least that’s what most people would say.  But how effective is that training? Is it pertinent and timely? What percentage of workers within your organization receive it? Does your training occur as a separate event that takes your workers away from the place where work is actually done? Is it linked effectively to their actual job tasks? How much do you suppose your workers remember and apply from that intensive and expensive training program they attended as they started their job?  What programs do you have in place so that your workers at all levels are challenged to exhibit sustained proficiency and continuous improvement? Have you looked lately at the time to get your workers to proficient performance levels? And have you compared that figure to your average turnover rate? In some cases, organizations are losing employees faster than they can get them to proficiency.

Be proficient in multiple products/service areas

To stay competitive, organizations must expand their product and service offerings. Workers are thus challenged to stay abreast of these changes, and to have sufficient knowledge of them in order to serve customers optimally. 

Maintain productivity with a smaller workforce

Layoffs continue to soar around the world. Organizations are getting smaller. Sometimes they have to reduce workforce numbers in order to survive; there are too many in the lifeboat. But will there be enough left behind to navigate and row the boat to safety?  Other organizations are moving to leaner and flatter structures in order to improve efficiency. But leaner does not necessarily mean better-performing. How many organizations are coupling downsizing movements with efforts toward changing the work and empowering the workers who remain behind? Statistics show that downsizing during the 2000s did more poorly than competitors who maintained their workforce numbers. The reason: the workers who were left behind after the downsizing movement got buried by the avalanche of work that remained – the un-engineered work, so to speak. Asking fewer people to do more work old way is not exactly the best way to make lasting improvements in company performance. 

Cope with the information deluge

The same workers who must cope with fewer colleagues and with more complex products and services to sell also face a bewildering onslaught of information from external sources. The mind reels at the figures: the amount of available information doubles every five years, we are told. In fact, the amazing technological developments in the past decade or so have only intensified the problem as more information has been made available to the workforce.  In a global economy, with today’s telecommunication capabilities, one could mix working and living twenty-four hours a day, even seven days a week. Intense? Frightening? Perhaps.

Computer systems make access to information easier than ever, but they don’t tell workers what to do with that information. At the rate that information is increasing, the system’s ability to support the worker is not keeping up. Occasionally, a worse-case scenario occurs for today’s knowledge workers: as information continued to deluge them, they simply ignore it.

Information technology has tried to address these performance challenges form its beginnings. But a machine-oriented point of view has reached its limits of its ability to help workers perform their jobs. To this point, an inadequate amount of attention has been paid to the knowledge worker, insufficient focus has been placed on the individual, the person, the workforce. Organizations developed the processes, automated them with new technology, and then “trained” the users a week before system conversion. At one time, this worked well enough. But as the workplace has become increasingly complex,  the gap between what organizations want technology to do and what it really is doing, and the gap between optimal  workforce performance,  have become deep and difficult chasms to bridge. A machine-oriented approach to technology has resulted in systems that have been static and one-dimensional. We have ended up with organizations whose workers are system users, not knowledge workers or system-enabled service workers.

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TCB & ASSOCIATES

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