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.