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Creating a high performance workplace

By Alan Bourne, Chartered Occupational Psychologist

Piles of paper in outbox 2 Modern management is full of talk about the value of people to organisations. Much of this rhetoric is somewhat superficial and doesn't necessarily tell us either how much difference it makes or what to do about it.

In this article we address the evidence for what really makes a difference and specifically what managers can do to ensure they provide a high performance workplace for their team. This entails not simply a focus on standard 'HR' but on those activities that will really make the difference and ensure you have a top-performing programme or project team.

So what is needed to deliver high performance working? A large and growing body of research has looked at the question 'what works at work?' There are a number of key characteristics of high performance workplaces:

  • Employees are highly skilled
  • Employee motivation and commitment are strong
  • Jobs are well designed and roles fit together well
  • Opportunities are provided for people to participate in improving how they do their work
  • Strong cultural values underlie how people work together and make decisions
  • Structures are efficiently organised (i.e. not bureaucratic)
  • The necessary tools and resources and physical environment are provided
On a high level, making this happen requires a combination of two key elements:

  • Having a workforce of talented and motivated people
  • Having a highly effective system through which work is organised and people are recruited, managed and developed
Through the combination of good people and a good system for managing them, high performance can be delivered. Lacking one or both of these is likely to result in sub-optimal performance

The case for a high performance workplace

The business case for creating high performance workplaces is increasingly strong, with studies in sectors as diverse as steel mills, automotive plants, banking, retail and healthcare.

Company Charts 11 They show that good management of people leads to improvements in performance measures such as productivity, profit, new products to market and customer satisfaction.

Some key examples include:

  • In a study of 968 US firms in 1995, the researcher Mark Huselid found that organisations using progressive people management techniques made $27,000 more sales and $4,000 more profit per employee. For a company in the UK employing 10,000 staff this equates to roughly £22 million more profit - well worth having!
  • Malcolm Patterson and colleagues at Sheffield University, in their 1997 study of 67 manufacturing firms in the UK showed that 19% of productivity and 18% of profitability was explained by the use of high performance people management
  • A study of 366 UK firms published in 2003 by David Guest at King's College showed that high performance management was strongly linked to lower staff turnover and higher profits per employee
  • Michael West and colleagues at Aston Business School, examining hospitals in the NHS in 2003, showed that high performance people management was linked to lower patient mortality rates and higher quality of care, having controlled for other factors such as number of doctors per bed
The key point about the evidence above it is that rather than just rhetoric, there is now strong research evidence that getting the people element right really does make a bottom-line difference.

Understanding this is important to the project manager on two levels. Firstly, it is important to ensure your programme or project is doing all it can to get the best from its people and has the resources to do so. Secondly, understanding deficiencies in the wider organisation or client can be helpful in identifying implementation issues you may encounter.

Key steps to a high performance workplace

There are essentially two parts to delivering high performance working. The first part is all about putting the basic enablers in place. The second is transforming how work is done to ensure top performance day in, day out. Firstly, it is important to get the basics in place, as follows:

Selection: recruiting the best people, using techniques such as psychometric testing and competency-based interviewing to make sure candidates are accurately screened
Engaging new starters: providing useful induction with support at hand and a clear introduction to ways of working and culture
Development: analysing development needs of individuals and teams in terms of both technical and 'soft skills', and providing relevant training and development to meet any gaps
Pay and benefits: providing a competitive salary package or contract rate to secure good quality employees, with reasonable guarantees of employment security.
Performance management: ensuring both individuals and teams as whole have clear objectives and are managed accordingly, rewarding excellence and dealing with under-performance
Diversity: having a good mix of skills, backgrounds and types of people brings a breadth of ideas and improved problem-solving
Work environment: ensuring resources are in place so that the tools, equipment and facilities to support high performance working are in place and people have what they need to do the job well
Accurate information: having clear data on the both the costs of employing people, who is doing what and the benefits they contribute to the programme or project

Transforming into a high performance workplace requires not just the right support systems, however, but focusing on how people work together, in particular:

Leadership: most people react best to leaders who connect with them and aren't hierarchical in their approach. This means getting 'back to the floor' and spending time with people at all levels, including frontline operators, customers, support staff and other managers. Then a clear direction needs to be set and pursued vigorously, delivering on promises and inspiring confidence in staff

Team-based working: teams need to have clear tasks, be measured as a team rather than individuals and fit well with other teams. Roles within a team should be complementary, clear and interdependent. Where these criteria are met, teams are highly effective in delivering results with limited monitoring, far more so than individuals working independently.

Flexible structures: minimising the number of management levels and differences of status has significant impact on two levels. Firstly, lines of communication are quicker and more fluid between whoever is leading a programme and different people delivering key tasks. Also, with few middle managers, the project management overheads are kept to a minimum.

Two men in suits walking Communication: timely, open and honest communication with all staff, avoiding a 'need to know' culture, is invaluable in ensuring good decisions are made and mistakes avoided. This is also critical for people to feel valued, as they are in the loop and trusted.

Participation: one of the biggest areas of opportunity loss in many projects is lack of participation of team members in decisions, be they large or small. Usually the people doing the frontline tasks are those who know best how things can be improved or made more efficient. Providing regular open forums and sometimes confidential channels to raise issues are vital to get people involved in making the whole project work better. Doing this takes up some time but invariably leads to better results and savings downstream.

Continuous innovation: high performing workplaces are continuously finding new and more effective ways of delivering their goals. This doesn't mean endless time wasted navel-gazing. It does mean high quality communication and participation being used to good effect - to make things work better and always keeping an eye open for opportunities. The role of the leader in enabling this is crucial. Good innovations need to be implemented. 'No' should be a word that is not heard frequently!

Summary

The case for ensuring your project enables high performance working is a strong one. There is growing evidence showing that in organisations where the right management techniques are in place and working well, delivery of business results is significantly enhanced. Some of the key enablers to make this happen have been outlined, leaving two key questions. Firstly, can you afford not to enable high performance working on your project or programme? Secondly, is a lack of good people management in your wider organisation or client getting in the way of delivering your project?
 
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