Olympics 2012: What the employers’ guides do not tell you

This week’s blog is a Guest Blog from my colleague at Capgemini Anjali Pendlebury-Green.  Anjali heads up the Employee Transformation practice at Capgemini and is a leading thinker on the practices of HR professionals.  This blog is a classic case of a good point, well made.  I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did

Last week, my friends and I went on our regular dinner catch up. Two of them are HR professionals at a London government agency whilst the other is an organisation development professional at a city bank. As must be common when a couple of Londoners meet up, our conversation turned to the Olympics, with my government agency friends telling us that they, along with most of the other support staff, were going to be redeployed by their employer to frontline customer facing roles for the Olympics.

                     

They excitedly described the roles that they were going to play and how they expected the general public who would be their customers through this redeployment period to interact with them. One of them went to the extent to state that while back-office staff had been redeployed only for a restricted period of time during the Olympics, she would have really liked to be redeployed for the duration of the period as her contribution. After all, the whole organisation was going to be focussed on the Games.

My city friend then piped up saying that her organisation was doing the same and redeploying staff in front line roles such as their call centre, which they expected would be really busy. Again she was excited by this as this meant that for the first time she had the opportunity to walk in her internal clients’ shoes and experience what they did. This, she thought, would make her more effective in her role.

What really struck me how each of these individuals was really looking forward to the opportunity offered to them by their organisation to contribute to the Olympics effort and to feel a part of ‘making it happen’. Yet when I google advice for HR professionals  around the Olympics, the literature available primarily focussed on managing absenteeism, Games related sickies and setting policies around Olympics holidays.

Yet here was a completely different angle and opportunity that most employers may have been missing. ‘Your Olympics ‘get ready’ plan may well be a great employee engagement tool’.  After all the CIPD UK British employee engagement report  indicates that 33% of employees are interested in helping their organisation achieve its goals and want more involvement in doing so.

What had my friends excited were the following:

"Working in the roles that my internal customers perform makes me more effective": Stepping into the shoes of my clients means that no longer do I not ‘get it’. If you are one of the organisations that can offer back office staff the opportunity to work in alternate roles, do discuss the benefits. After all job swaps/workshadowing offers improved internal communications and team working, encourages out of the box thinking and even helps clarify career development and movement opportunities.
"I feel like I can contribute and am not missing out on the action anymore":  The Olympics 2012 is the greatest show in London. Yet several individuals who have the desire to be a part of this have not yet found the opportunity as they have either been rejected as volunteers or just don’t have the right avenue. If you are involving them in your organisation ‘get ready’ initiative, do explain this in your communications. After all, everyone would like to attend the Olympic party.
"I received training to do this other job": Most relevant for Gen Y employees, the opportunity to train in and gain experience in alternate skill sets is a unique engagement lever.
"Even our senior leaders are getting involved": Leaders should lead by practice. This not only sets an example and advocates a participative culture, but also makes them accessible to their staff.

From the employer perspective,

• Redeploying back office staff to the frontline as part of your get ready plan delivers better value than hiring temporary staff. Your staff know your business better than temporary staff and the training investment goes towards multi-skilling your existing staff base and is no longer a short term spend.
• Cross training and working across teams gives your employees a broader perspective of what your business does and involves them in areas that they would never otherwise see or experience.
• From a longer term perspective, your Olympic get ready plan, could help you test the viability of job swaps as an embedded training and even career development tool , to be used on an ongoing basis.

So it’s not too late to think of your Olympic get ready plan as great tool to invest in and engage with your workforce and create a win – win situation.

Why Innovation Matters – A very personal perspective

Whilst I’m relatively “touchy feely”, I’m sure that I have always been slightly wary of people who have “over shared” in order to make their point.

So, at the risk of being a walking cliché and “over sharing” I want to take the remaining space in this blog to talk about a source of my ongoing passion for Innovation.

For the last 6 years, I and my immediate family and friends have all had front row seats to observe, (fairly helplessly), the slow and pernicious deterioration in my Mum’s mental capacities as she succumbs to ever deeper levels of Alzheimer’s. 

For those not familiar with Alzheimer’s it is currently an incurable disease of the nervous system that slowly strips away from its sufferers the ability to remember the details of life whilst often simultaneously gifting them with low grade paranoia, an inability to initiate activities, crankiness, aggressiveness and social inappropriateness.  Due to the nature of the disease it is not unusual for a sufferer, to not only lose themselves, but to also damage the key relationships they had worked so hard to build up during their lives leaving them truly isolated and alone. What is particularly scary is that 1 in 3 of us will die whilst suffering from some level of Alzheimer’s

So what does all this have to do with my ongoing passion for Innovation? Well, when you watch someone you care about lose, piece by piece, all that matters to them it doesn’t half give you a reminder that life is to be lived today and more than anything else, it is the quality rather than the quantity of that life that really matters.  So what I really love doing is working with people who look to innovate, not only to improve the quantity of their profits but to improve the quality of the lives of their customers, employees and communities.  It takes no more than 10 seconds of reflection on my Mum’s situation (she started showing signs of Alzheimer’s in her early 60’s) to remember and remind myself that life is just too short.  It’s too short not to celebrate and encourage those researchers and innovators who work to make life better – I thank you.  It’s too short to do anything other than pour myself out to improve the way people work and live. That, for me, is time well spent.  Innovation should not merely be about “clever financial engineering to maximise profit” – it should be about the application of our passion, intellect and humanity to wrestle with and overcome life’s big problems.

Thank you for having the grace to have read this far in what reads like a very cheesy blog – not sure how else I could have written it.  More pacey blog to follow next week.

Goldman Sachs PR team are brilliant and fully deserve their massive bonuses

If you are a regular reader of this blog you may be forgiven for thinking that, given the title of this blog, I have taken leave of my critical faculties, have secretly been sniffing glue or am now co-habiting with a member of the Goldman Sachs (GS) PR team.  Thankfully none of these is true. 

However, credit where credit is due.  Last month, Greg Davies, a very senior GS Executive very publicly lobbed a massively incendiary letter into the heart of the GS business machinery.  See the original letter by following the link below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-goldman-sachs.html?_r=2&hp

To sum up and paraphrase, what he said was the following:

1.       The GS environment is now seriously toxic and destructive

2.       The interests of GS’s clients are secondary – making money is primary

3.       The current CEO and the current President, have lost control of the firm and are presiding over a massive decline in moral fibre

4.       To get ahead in GS you need to be able to persuade your clients to buy stuff they neither need or want without regard to its impact on them

5.       Oh and occasionally senior people refer to their clients as Muppets (no surprise there)

The instant result – an immediate 3.4% decline in GS’s share price and a massive swathe of negative press coverage, surely this was a body blow, surely this could be an event of such great a magnitude that it has the ability to topple the GS giant?

The solution – deploy the PR team – first up a master piece of letter writing for internal circulation and external publication, of course.  The note sent by CEO Lloyd Blankfein is reprinted by CNN below.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/03/14/markets/goldman-sachs-greg-smith-statement/index.htm

To sum up and paraphrase what GS said:

1.       When you have 30,000 employees someone’s bound to be unhappy – he’s just a crazy maverick

2.       We don’t believe he’s right – we’re very proud of our firm

3.       Greg didn’t follow the proper processes for registering his complaints – he’s a naughty boy

4.       Here’s another 10 reasons why we are fantastic – we’ve won lots of awards so we must be good

What they didn’t do was respond to any of the big issues – a stroke of genius.  What happens next – and this is the really brilliant play - GS orders an internal review – not to assess whether or not they are morally bankrupt and desperate to rip off their customers (oh no) – instead they set out to find out who has called their clients a muppet – a topic the soundbite hungry press have already latched onto.  The reason this is genius – it totally deflects attention away from the really damaging claims and focuses on an act of behaviour that most people in most businesses have been susceptible too at some time or another when under great stress.  Therefore, when GS weed out the bad mouthers we’ll all look on with admiration at the high standards of behaviour required by GS Execs and almost end up feeling sorry for them.  So how will this all end - no doubt in six months time a couple of mid ranking executives will be reprimanded for “non-client centric behaviour and/or inappropriate use of language”.  The muppet hunt will be over and the scapegoats will be “dealt with internally”.  All will be forgotten and GS will continue on as Masters of the Universe – God Bless their PR.  As for the share price – it’s now about 5% above where it was before Greg’s letter was published – it’s a funny old world.