Schlagwort-Archive: Loyalty

What is wanted

The modern workplace is moving. Globalization, information society and digitalization are transforming the working environment powerfully as at the advent of the steam engine. Manual labor shifts globally to where it is the cheapest. The physical values are replaced by informational. Digitalization virtualizes business processes. The remaining jobs provide expensive skilled or precarious less-educated activities. In both cases, the money is no longer sufficient in order to hold the people at work. The management thinks that the workforce desires good remuneration, a safe workplace, promotion and growth, good working conditions, interesting work, compassionate help with personal problems, loyalty to the employees, visible recognition, tactful discipline and active participation. Are these things really what is wanted?

In the following you find some criteria that are relevant for each of us. It is based on these ideas.

  1. Visible appreciation
    The ability to perform is in every employee. Additional amplifiers are praise, acknowledgment and respect. The biggest impact will be achieved, if the appreciation is visible to all. There are always appropriate occasions – at meetings, at the end of a project, at celebrations.
  2. Promotion and growth
    Especially the young workforce is motivated by career perspectives, which have a relatively long effect. Staggered programs that take several years increase on the one hand the operational ability and maintain on the other hand the tension. This includes certificates, education with popular coaches, training courses that interest the employees, and ultimately continuous growth through promotion.
  3. Active participation
    If the decisions are made over the heads of the employees, this dims their performance. Through employee participation, everyone is shaping the future. This reaches e.g. from capital to profit sharing to the joint designing of workflows and working conditions, like continuous improvement processes, quality circles or the learning organization. Important building blocks are the elements of self-organization – the joint development of the strategy, the structures and the processes, as well as participation in decisions that affect one.
  4. Good working conditions
    The working conditions are determined by various factors. The subjective ones are influenced by physical, intellectual, and mental states, which lead to a personal attitude – e.g. positive view, exhaustion, dislike. The factual aspects result from the available technology, the attractiveness of the workplace as well as the official regulations regarding the breaks, flextime or vacation.
  5. Good remuneration
    Even if payment does not have a long-term effect, it represents an important basis for employee satisfaction. In principle, the split in fixed and variable remuneration provides an additional motivator in the form of salary, holiday / Christmas money, and bonuses. It is favorable, if the distribution depends to a large extent on the individual performance. “Socialist” levies on the basis of total success, without consideration of the personal contribution, rev the individual not so much up.
  6. Compassionate support with personal problems
    The most important relationships in everyday life are found in the work environment. This leads to the fact that personal problems are becoming visible over time. If the company offers a trustworthy environment that allows the employees to get advice in case of personal problems, to receive support from the supervisor or even from the HR department, then the workforce is intrinsically committed to the company.
  7. Interesting work
    Interesting tasks are especially encouraging for the particularly powerful employees. For this purpose, the challenges should fit with the interests of the individual, have a certain degree of difficulty or promise additional status. In conjunction with visible recognition, the employees are motivated for a long period of time.
  8. Loyalty to employees
    Active employee retention measures ensure loyalty. For this, you only need fair basic conditions, an open communication culture, backing and, for example, a visible appreciation. Poor personnel management is a central reason for the lack of loyalty. If the company does not realize this loyalty loss, they are surprised by the termination of the employee.
  9. Safe workplace
    Jobs will be safe, if you remain physically and mentally without harm and the place, where you work, is not dangerous. The potential threats of the workplace are overshadowed by the danger of not having one. The flexibilisation of the working world has become possible due to powerful IT programs. The simplified selection and administration of personnel has opened the door for flexible working hours and diverse types of employment. The results are precarious jobs, part-time work and increasing fluctuation.
  10. Perceived self-efficacy
    The freedom that is available for improving the work creates the self-efficacy that motivates to collaborate. As soon as you make intrinsically changes and prioritize the necessary tasks, you take ownership of the improvement. The necessary self-discipline and the respect for each other determine the working environment decisively.

Bottom line: What is wanted in the working day is once again moving. Today’s attitudes challenge tightly organized companies. The workforce wants visible recognition, active participation, compassionate help with personal problems, a safe workplace, good compensation, interesting work, promotion and growth, loyalty to the employees, good working conditions and tactful discipline. The different understanding of what the workforce really wants is reflected in the different prioritization of the management (see in the first section) and the employees (see in this paragraph), e.g. the importance of an interesting work, active participation, or the desire for compassionate support with personal problems. Once the executives take into account what is wanted, the company’s performance will increase – see more here !!

The future of leadership

Guidance is one of the oldest roles in societies. And nevertheless executives are continuously looking for the right style of their role. Apart from the tasks and tools of leadership managers are concerned with the following questions.

  1. How much involvement is possible?
  2. How many rules are needed?
  3. How do I distribute tasks, authorities and responsibilities?
  4. How much loyalty do I need? How does it emerge?
  5. How do I promote cooperation?
  6. How to select executives?
  7. How much leadership do we need at all?

Do new systemic concepts like holistic, autonomous units, interconnectedness, participation, and self-organization, pave the way for new, yet not recognizable styles of leadership? How does the future of leadership looks like?

Fuehrung

Executives provide goals, organize, decide, evaluate and foster employees by using various tools (e.g. role descriptions, regular communication, performance reviews). They control with it their area, create orientation and take responsibility for the results (You find more about tasks and tools of leadership here: http://www.malik-management.com/en/malik-approach/malik-basic-models).
Without leadership, these aspects have to be developed in the team and consent has to be agreed. Positive examples of self-organizing groups are the agile teams in software development and other creative professions.

Nevertheless, new approaches imply also new answers to the questions of executives.

  1. Involvement results from democratic forms of cooperation, like having a say and participation. These can also be established in connection with hierarchical structures. For a long time, autonomous, self-organizing teams are common practice in the context of bureaucratic structures, like projects, Centers of Competence or Production islands.
  2. Regulations range from chaos to orderliness and from voluntary to mandatory. They are important tools, in order to clarify the desired behavior of the employees. These rules become meaningful with the appropriate level of detail that covers the tension between patronizing and autonomy. The joint agreement of basic guidelines in the governance minimizes the number of regulations.
  3. Task, authority and responsibility (TAR) of a role should be consolidated under one roof. The best example of the distribution of TAR is the subsidiarity principle of the Vatican. It bundles decisions at the point of action. Only if this is no longer possible, the role is established on the next higher level.
  4. The loyalty is an important element of leadership that cannot be directly created. On the one hand, it results from the authoritarian or charismatic attitudes of a leader. On the other hand, it evolves from the indirect stimulation of the commitment with personal, content-wise and formal commitment amplifiers.
  5. Cooperation can be designed in various ways by using the new possibilities of networking and self-organization. The exchange of information can be realized with common intranet sites, discussion groups and blogs. The employees access via mobile PCs or smartphones their necessary data wherever and whenever. The employees meet independently of their whereabout within phone and video conferences.
  6. The selection of executives has an influence on their acceptance. However, democratic approaches like the direct selection or recruiting of leaders by the employees, does not guarantee their effectiveness. Independently of the selection procedure, there will always be some employees, who accept the boss – or not. As you can also see in politics, democratic elections result in a distribution of 51% to 49% – i.e. half of the population does not want the winner.
  7. At the latest, when the number of members of an organization exceeds the magic Dunbar number of 150, we need leadership and an adequate hierarchy. Small organizations, like start-ups, can survive for a certain time without formal structures. We should not to forget that these are also often driven autocratically by a founder.

Bottom line: Like an orchestra will never like to forgo the conductor, we cannot let go the integrating role of leadership in the future. Each undertaking needs the strategic alignment and concluding decisions by executives. The guidance becomes state-of-the-art by using the new possibilities for cooperation.