Saturday, July 29, 2006
Leverage III
Is there really a labor shortage or have we simply accepted chronic, pervasive underemployment? My point is that if we fully engaged people on the job, we would harness a lot more energy and productivity from our existing workforce. But with our current approach to job design and our assembly-line approach to work, we get only a small portion of what people have to offer. We seem unable to fully engage people in their work. Far too many people punch in physically and check out mentally. We may or may not be in a labor shortage, but we are certainly wasting human capital. You know those studies that show we only use about ten percent of our brain? If comparable studies were done on our workforce, we'd probably learn we're only using half of whats available.
The ability to fully engage a person creates leverage by taking a small amount money and focusing an entire person on a task. When we fail to engage someone, we fail to leverage them. When we succeed, we get more involvement, better decisions, and people taking ownership of tasks. We get better results for the business as a whole. We promote people who do this. We also (mistakenly) think it's a rare trait when we seek it in employees. We ignore the possibility that our job design, with inherently narrow descriptions, structures out these traits and engulfs employees in repetitive, boring work.
What does it take to wake up a generation of managers? When will they realize most of us have the capacity to do so much more than the narrow slot into which we've been fitted?
Further, as engagement is widely recognized as key to success (ask any manager), why is it not measured? It seems obvious that an engagement index for an organization would be useful in gauging the productive capacity of it's workforce.
Insofar as we believe we "manage" human capital, it seems presumptuous to do so without focusing on a worker's level of engagement as the central factor to be managed. How long can we afford to remain inefficeint (read: stupid) with our human capital in an increasingly competitive global economy?
The ability to fully engage a person creates leverage by taking a small amount money and focusing an entire person on a task. When we fail to engage someone, we fail to leverage them. When we succeed, we get more involvement, better decisions, and people taking ownership of tasks. We get better results for the business as a whole. We promote people who do this. We also (mistakenly) think it's a rare trait when we seek it in employees. We ignore the possibility that our job design, with inherently narrow descriptions, structures out these traits and engulfs employees in repetitive, boring work.
What does it take to wake up a generation of managers? When will they realize most of us have the capacity to do so much more than the narrow slot into which we've been fitted?
Further, as engagement is widely recognized as key to success (ask any manager), why is it not measured? It seems obvious that an engagement index for an organization would be useful in gauging the productive capacity of it's workforce.
Insofar as we believe we "manage" human capital, it seems presumptuous to do so without focusing on a worker's level of engagement as the central factor to be managed. How long can we afford to remain inefficeint (read: stupid) with our human capital in an increasingly competitive global economy?
