Many Australian businesses still face uncertain times.

An recent article in The Australian newspaper described the potential threat of a GFC 2 resulting from the debt-ridden economies of Europe.

At HRwisdom we are very much focussed on being proactive and taking positive planning steps (and we’ll talk more soon about some excellent employee retention tools you can use).

However, for those businesses in Australia which may be suffering or trying to manage their costs very closely, we have put together an excellent free HR resource which explains:

How To Manage Redundancies Without Destroying All Employee Goodwill

In this HRwisdom resource, we have turned to industry expert Jacqui Alder to offer practical advice to businesses facing this difficult issue.

In this redundancy information we look at:

• What are the advantages and disadvantages of offering voluntary redundancies versus conducting forced redundancies/involuntary redundancies?
• What are the steps involved in the redundancy process?
• How to select people for involuntary redundancy?
• How to communicate throughout the redundancy process?
• Should you march someone out immediately when making them redundant?
• How can you implement redundancies without destroying all employee goodwill?
• A case study.

You can access the information via the home page sign-up:  redundancy information

Kind regards,

HRwisdom

The recent debacle at Toyota which has seen the company lose a reported $155 million per week has been widely reported. With continuing product recalls around the world, the losses are estimated to have caused an astonishing $30 billion loss in Toyota’s valuation on the stock market.

At HRwisdom we always focus on ideas and practices that can actively improve or protect a business. Today, we refer you to an excellent analysis of how poor HR policies and staff management practices potentially led to the $30 billion loss at Toyota.

The Eight Bad Staff Management Practices

In his excellent analysis, John Sullivan lists the eight bad staff management practices that contributed to Toyota’s massive downfall.

1. Rewards and recognition — The purpose of any corporate reward process is to encourage and incentivise the right behaviors and to discourage the negative ones. It’s important for the reward process to incentivise the gathering of information about problems. It’s equally important to reward employees who are successful in getting executives to take immediate action on negative information. Key questions — Were rapid growth (sales have nearly doubled recently) and “lean” cost-cutting recognized and rewarded so heavily that no one was willing to put the brakes on growth in order to focus on safety? Were the rewards for demonstrating error-free results so high that obvious errors were swept under the table?
2. Training — The purpose of training is to make sure that employees have the right skills and capabilities to identify and handle all situations they may encounter. Toyota is famous for its four-step cycle — plan/do/check/act — but clearly the training among managers now needs to focus more on the last two. In addition, in an environment where safety is paramount, everyone should have been trained on the symptoms of “groupthink” and how to avoid the excess discounting or ignoring of negative external safety information. Key question — If Toyota’s training was more effective, would the managers involved have been more successful in convincing executives to act on the negative information received?
3. Hiring — The purpose of great hiring is to bring on board top-performing individuals with the high level of skills and capabilities that are required to handle the most complex problems. Poorly designed recruiting and assessment elements can result in the hiring of individuals who sweep problems under the rug and who are not willing to stand up to management. Key questions — Did Toyota have a poorly designed hiring process that allowed it to hire individuals who were not experienced in the required constructive confrontation technique? Were their hires poor learners that did not change as a result of company training?
4. The performance management process — The purpose of a performance management process is to periodically monitor or appraise performance, in order to identify problem behaviors before they get out of hand. If the performance measurement system included performance factors to measure responsiveness to negative information, Toyota wouldn’t be in turmoil today. Key questions — Was the performance appraisal and performance monitoring process so poorly designed that they did not identify and report groupthink type errors? Did Toyota’s famous high level of trust of its employees go too far without reasonable metrics, checks, and balances? Did HR develop sophisticated metrics that produced alerts to warn senior managers before minor problems got out of control?
5. The corporate culture — The role of a corporate culture is to informally drive employee behaviors so that it closely adheres to the company’s core values. Because these errors occurred under difficult driving conditions, it’s hard to blame the production group, which has a well-known reputation for Six Sigma quality in its construction. The negative reports came to functions like government, risk analysis, corporate and customer satisfaction. As a result, it is the culture within the corporate offices that need to be more closely monitored rather than assuming that the culture was aligned. It appears that the corporate culture created leaders so concerned with “saving face” and so adverse to negative publicity, that they for years postponed making the announcement of a massive recall. Key questions — Did HR’s failure to measure or monitor the corporate culture contribute to its misalignment? Was the corporate culture (the Toyota Way) so biased toward positive information that employees learned not to make waves, in spite of their professional responsibility to be heard on safety issues?
6. Leadership development and succession planning — The purpose of leadership development and succession planning processes are to ensure that a sufficient number of leaders with the right skills and decision-making ability are placed into key leadership positions. It is likely that the leadership development and the promotion process both failed to create and promote leaders who were capable of confronting problems and making difficult decisions. Key question — Was the leadership process at Toyota so outdated that it produced the wrong kind of leaders with outdated competencies, who could not successfully operate in the rapidly changing automotive industry?
7. Employee Retention — The purpose of a retention program is to identify and keep top performers and individuals with mission-critical skills. Key question — Did the retention program ignore people that brought up problems and as a result, did these whistleblowers often leave out of frustration?
8. Risk assessment — Most HR departments don’t even have a risk assessment team whose purpose is to both identify and calculate risks caused by weak employee processes. Clearly HR should have worked with corporate risk management at Toyota in order to ensure that employees were capable of calculating the long-term actual costs of ignoring product failure information. Key question — Should HR work with risk-assessment experts and build the capability of identifying and quantifying the revenue impacts of major HR errors, including a high hiring failure rate, a high turnover rate among top performers, and the cost of keeping a bad manager or employee?

Final Thoughts from John Sullivan

Toyota’s problems are not the result of a single individual making an isolated mistake, but rather due to a companywide series of mistakes that are all related to each other. So many corporate functions were involved, including customer service, government relations, vendor management and PR, that one cannot help but attribute the crash of Toyota to systemic management failure. Unfortunately, in this case, the famous Japanese saying is true. “The nail that stands out” was not encouraged to be different, but instead it was “pounded down” to conform.

The key lesson that others should learn from Toyota’s mistakes is that HR needs to periodically test or audit each of the processes that could allow this type of billion-dollar error to occur.

For more staff management advice and HR ideas you can join our mailing list or get your HR templates and Employee Retention information now.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

At HRwisdom, our focus is on sharing practical, useful staff management information and tools.

Easy Scripts For Difficult Moments

In today’s HRwisdom blog, we’ll share with you some excellent advice from the Harvard Business Review which may help you in difficult work situations.

This advice will help you build upon the recent release of the 30 scripts to manage difficult employees.

The scripts were written by Australian experts for use in Australian workplaces.

• Is constantly late
• Keeps talking and interrupting others
• Is insecure about their job
• Is overly emotional at work
• Is producing poor results
• Has a bad attitude that is affecting other team members
• Is reluctant to delegate
• Makes offensive comments
• Can’t seem to learn from their mistakes
• Says Yes, then does nothing
• Flatly refuses your request
• Does not respond to you at all
• Acts inappropriately
• Has been technically careless
• Is struggling with project planning

In today’s HRwisdom blog post, we refer you to an excellent posting from the Harvard Business Review blog which may help you in difficult work situations.

The Harvard Business Review post by Jodi Glickman Brown offers help on an interesting angle: how to ask for help without looking stupid. This is important because:

Jodi Glickman Brown: “…learning how to ask for help – and how to do it right – is critical to doing your job well and setting yourself up for success.

You may be afraid of looking dumb, but to be afraid to ask for and get the help you need is inexcusable, especially when the stakes are high. Asking for help in the workplace is a good thing. In fact, asking for help the right way can show how smart you are: it demonstrates that you’ve got good judgment and shows that you know what you know and what you don’t know. Moreover, getting help up front saves endless time, energy and resources on the back end; in the Madoff case, it could have saved billions of dollars and immeasurable heartache.

Of course, it’s not just asking for help — it’s asking the right way. I recently coached a young man in commercial real-estate who relayed a conversation he had with his boss about starting a new regional initiative for his firm’s brokers. Several times he asked, “How should I do this?” or “How should I think about this?” I cringed every time.

Instead, think about the following strategy to get the best answer — and show how smart you are — the next time you ask for help:

Start your question with what you know. Do your homework first. Get enough background information to put your issue or problem in context. Give the other person an idea of what you’ve completed to date or what you know already and then proceed to explain what’s outstanding, where or how you’re struggling, or what you need help with.

Then, state the direction you want to take and ask for feedback, thoughts or clarification. Form an opinion on what you think the answer should be. Don’t just ask, “How should I reach out to the brokers?” Instead propose a course of action and get your boss’s feedback: “I’m thinking of sending out a mass email to the brokers but I’m not sure if that’s the most effective format…what do you think of that approach?”

If you don’t know the direction to take, ask for tangible guidance. Instead of asking “What should I do?” ask specifically for the tools you’ll need to make that decision yourself, such as a recent example of a similar analysis or a template for a given task. Or, ask for a referral to someone who has worked on a similar initiative or project in the past.

In the vast majority of cases, you’ll get a lot further in your career by asking the tough, smart questions.”

 Scripts to manage difficult employees.

HRwisdom Support

The Fair Work Act has led to many headaches and concerns in businesses all over Australia. The clock is ticking and the countdown has begun for the major changes to employment law which will directly affect you and your employees.

As part of our ongoing commitment to helping Australian employers manage their staff even better during these challenging times, we recently provided our free subscribers with the opportunity to ask your own specific Fair Work Act questions to our guest expert, Ron Jones.

As a very experienced and knowledgeable management consultant, Ron is heavily involved in resolving IR and HR issues for organisations struggling to cope with the ambiguities of the Fair Work Act changes.

Ron has studied the changes and believes there are two major areas of concern: a new set of National Employment Standards and the award modernisation process.

Specific Fair Work Questions Answered

You may want to know:

• Does the Fair Work Act apply to us?
• We already have an employment agreement in place – can’t we just keep using this?
• Does this mean that our letters of offer and employment contracts no longer apply?
• What exactly do we need to do before 1 January 2010?

What Were The Questions Answered?

To see the Fair Work Act questions answered by Ron, all you need to do is to scroll down to the Comments section of this specific blog posting (if you can’t see the Comments section at the bottom, you may need to click on the top title of this post first).

Share Learnings With Colleagues

Do let your friends and colleagues know about this set of questions and answers. They’ll benefit from Ron’s insights and the whole HRwisdom community can learn from the online HR discussion. The link is:

http://blog.hrwisdom.com.au/2009/10/fair-work-act-questions-ask-an-expert/

Remember that there have been many additions and updates made to the HRwisdom HR documents for the Fair Work Act. You can access the documents now here: HR Advice.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

Something unusual has us a little worried here at HRwisdom and it relates to workplace bullying and workplace harassment: Why Your Business Can Be Sued Because Your Employees Listen To The Radio (Anywhere – Anytime)

NOTE: Find an answer for nearly any staff management issue in the HRwisdom Library.

A popular radio station recently ran a competition which, in a nutshell, is asking listeners to nominate the most annoying person in their workplace.

Here’s the promotional text from the radio station:

“Has someone done something stupid in your workplace? We want to know why one of your workmates is a dead set tool!

They might have an annoying trait that drives you up the wall…or tell stupid jokes and stories that aren’t really funny… or they might have done something…well very embarrassing.

Now’s the time to dob in your workmate – so tell us why you think your workmate should be the *RADIO STATION/SPONSOR* Workplace Tool of the Month.

YOU could win a $1,000 PRODUCT PRIZE TYPE A or PRODUCT PRIZE TYPE B thanks to *SPONSOR*…plus the Workplace Tool won’t go empty handed either…he/she gets the crown of being Workplace Tool of the Month winning a $100 gift voucher…plus being popular at work…NOT!”

Here’s a question to ponder: Is the employer accountable under Australian EEO (Equal Opportunity) law?

In a nutshell, yes, the employer can be held accountable for workplace bullying and harassment and there can be huge fines and penalties.

Next Question: Do any of your employees ever listen to the radio at home, at work, in the car, on the train, etc?

If so, we strongly urge you to ensure you have taken reasonable steps to prevent employee discrimination, workplace harassment and workplace bullying in your organisation right now.

Sounds silly? Not if you’ve saved yourself a legal headache when a claim arrives…

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

ps. Remember, You can always find an answer for nearly any staff management issue in the HRwisdom Library.