Most of Maria’s team have chosen to ignore the unfortunate opening statement Maria said when she met them as a group. (See previous blog). Perhaps it was just how it was said.

Maria has been in the job a few days and starts to arrange 1:1 meetings with her team. Her objective is to forge a relationship with each individual and to discover some of their strengths and weaknesses.

She’s delighted with the way the meetings go. Lot’s of ideas come from the team but they seem short on being able to identify weaknesses in the HR system and company in general and this concerns her.

Her team, however, think her approach to their 1:1s strange. She began by saying, “I’ve looked at your file and I must say I’m most impressed at the work you have done and would value your opinion on a few things.”

Maria continued, “What improvements do you think we can make in HR and I’m interested in knowing your thoughts on the weaknesses in the rest of the HR team and management in general?”

Maria has arrived for her first morning at her new job and has spent some time with the CEO to discuss with him the CEO’s plans for the HR Department.

She now decides decides that it’s time for her to meet with her new team and calls a team meeting. She begins by introducing herself, “Hello everyone, I’m Maria and I’m a fellow of the CIPD and a professional”. After meeting with her small team she arranges some one to one meetings and returns to her office satisfied that she’s started off well.

Could she have made her first error. Some of her team have interpreted her first statement of being a “fellow of the CIPD and a professional” that she thinks perhaps her team may not be! (qualified enough or unprofessional)

Time will tell

I came across a case study that I thought I could share with you as it develops. That is the adventures of Maria during her first six months in her new job.

Maria has volunteered herself to be featured in this blog and it will be interesting to see if she makes the typical mistakes of a new hire and a few “special mistakes” of her own.

Over the months of her job transition we can follow Maria and develop a case study around her.

The story begins:

Maria has landed a job as HR manager at an Insurance brokers employing about sixty people. Her team is made up of five people who are all qualified by examination with the CIPD (Chartered Institute for Personnel Development).

On her first morning she meets with the CEO and discusses the company’s main priorities with HR which is to reduce turnover and increase HR capability. She feels well briefed.

Government ministers and even some parts of the media  seem to be upbeat about the positive economic prospects in the UK saying that “the worst is over”.

Yet the financial indicators seem to point towards a different scenario. I came across a man in St Albans yesterday who has been out of a job since January and the city is in one of the wealthiest areas of the UK and only thirty five minutes from London.

Then again perhaps a better indicator of what the future holds could be the number of companies re-locating their head offices outside the UK in order to save the costs of future taxes.

McDonalds the US company, which opened its first restaurant in London in 1974, joins
other large US corporations that have based their European operations in
Switzerland, including Kraft, Procter & Gamble, Colgate Palmolive and
Yahoo. Google also chose Zurich for its European headquarters, despite
having a large office London.

Even home-grown UK companies have moved to
more favourable tax regimes. The list includes Regus, the temporary office
supplier, advertising giant WPP and
pharmaceuticals company Shire which are both relocating their headquarters
to Ireland, and Brit Insurance, which plans to move to the Netherlands.
Investment company Henderson set up a new parent company in Ireland.

The one person I do know who won’t be moving to save money will be the poor guy made redundant last January that I met earlier.

At the current time many companies are restructuring their teams to make savings but in the hope of increasing productivity.

The problem is that too many teams fail to achieve their anticipated outcome. In fact our research shows that only 60% of restructured teams increase productivity. The benefits have more to do with saving wages and staff costs.

A few months ago a business restructured its sales team. Territories have become larger, management reduced and incentives cut. All necessary business strategies.

However, the new team’s assimilation was poorly undertaken. Rationale for the need for the changes was poorly described to those affected, management went absent after the restructure to work on other projects, as a result morale dropped and a very popular sales manager left to work for competitors.

I was called in to help and after a series of individual and team meetings, changes to old fashioned reporting to remove some team frustrations and changing the office layout the team’s productivity has begun to rise and meet expectations.

The message here is that post assimilation of a team is as as important to the planning part of team assimilation after restructuring.

The removal of Rick Wagoner of General Motors and Christian Streiff of Citroen would seem to suggest that those seen as being responsible for poor business performance are being replaced by people not tarnished with the mistakes of the past.

One has to ask if this is the beginning of a cull of top business people seen as responsible for causing the financial crisis and whether it will satisfy people’s anger of like the French revolution simply call for more blood?

The continuing discussion on banks and bonuses seem to shift between the need to attract and retain people and not upsetting taxpayers who have bailed the banks out.The discussion must have been made more complicated by Barack Obama deciding to restrict bonuses.

In the UK the banks in question are RBS and Lloyds TSB but one must presume that others such as Barclays and even HSBC will be looking at the result with interest.

Could this be the start of moderate salaries and reduced bonuses accross all sectors?

It’s inevitable that as companies such as Barclays, Lloyds TSB, Marks & Spencer and even Tesco suffer reduced profits they are developing a strategy that reduces costs by reducing staff.
 
Such companies then create smaller working teams or integrate the remaining staff into other departments together with their responsibilities.

There is a hidden downside with this strategy.That is that often there isn’t enough time, or motivation due to a sense of emergency, to integrate the new team properly so that they are capable of being as productive as they might be.

Our research, over nine years, into individual and team productivity following the integration of new people shows that only 60% of such changes deliver the results that were anticipated.

Poor communication, lack of understanding of team results and changes in management style all contribute to the potential failure. The result is that costs rise, goals and opportunities are not met and this results in further downsizing.

Companies that are changing their teams need to consider that they are in effect changing the make up of the team dynamic and need to consider a integration period in exactly the same way as if they were to be introducing a new members of staff

A major challenge for business leaders is to maintain organisational productivity. (Formally defined as the ratio of an organisation’s total output to total input, adjusted for inflation, for a specific period of time).

Yet is this challenge made more difficult during a downturn?

One of the inputs in the formula is the workforce but at this time when many companies are laying off their people talent. The question that should be asked is how this affects the productivity of those that remain and can improvements in productivity be sustained under such circumstances?

During the previous downturn I was involved with a company that made a series of redundancies and each time a new redundancy was announced productivity collapsed in other parts of the organisation. This wasn’t to say that people seemed to stop working, on the contrary everyone seemed very busy.

However, productivity continues to fall as people discussed the worsening situation and the company’s Directors buried themselves in their offices stating that they were busy “saving the company”.

Too often business leaders might assume that they are unable to positively affect the situation and that under the circumstances a drop in morale is inevitable. I disagree with this assumption and advise far greater “management visibility” at such times.

The potential of three million being made unemployed in the USA if General Motors, Ford and Chrysler fail to gain financial backing from Congress coupled with Woolworth’s collapse and general downturn is the world heading for a “Depression” in 2009?