Eye on the Workforce

The winner of the 2011 Optimus Award for Managing Change goes to the city of Peoria.
The one in Arizona.

Why? They created a registered apprenticeship program to develop in-house talent.

Apprentice program? What is this  - back to the future? Weren’t apprenticeships used in a bygone era to develop wheelwrights and blacksmiths?

On the contrary, such programs are still popular in many unionized specialties, just not common in municipalities.

Peoria had a problem filling positions in their wastewater treatment plant right when a large amount of existing workers were soon retiring. (This started before the Great Recession kicked fully, but there is always the problem of high school students somehow overlooking wastewater treatment as a career.) The Peoria program built loyalty and quick expertise pairing traditional classroom learning with plenty of "quality time" with experts. Not only did the experts train quickly, but the apprenticeship engendered a feeling of loyalty.

Sure, you say, but what about an expertise on even a higher level? Would coaching work there? Why, yes it would.

Surgeon Atul Gawande writes in the New Yorker* about how a 20 minute conversation with a retired colleague improved his performance more than the previous five years of experience. This is a surgeon who went through extensive training, remember. Gawande explains in his article how he researched how coaching was used successfully in helping teachers. A value-add there was that the coached teachers adopted the new skills far better than those who took other types of training on the same skills.

Even as more and more technology is used to train workers, many companies are using one-on-one coaching. There is plenty of research backing up the effectiveness of coaching. The problem is that it is relatively expensive. Maybe that's why it's mostly used for senior executives.

What should you do as project manager?

• Use one-on-one coaching to quickly build sophisticated skills in workers who are filling positions requiring rare expertise.
• Bring in experts to conduct this training
• Plan to use these experts for a prolonged period rather than a week. Hire them from outside if you don't have them available internally for longer-term coaching.
• And consider getting yourself a coach: Someone who can watch your performance and give you feedback that you can use immediately. Once you improve, bring them in a gain to watch your performance. Just like sport figures do.

Remember: Perfect Practice Make Perfect

Workers across the organization are experiencing an environment which will lead to burnout - if it hasn't already - as described in my previous post. The effects of burnout are a significant obstacle to your project being completed successfully, so it pays for you to use techniques to minimize these effects.

Consider the "gas tank" metaphor suggested by management professor Wayne Hochwarter (Florida State University in Tallahassee). The key to this metaphor is that workers can be low on fuel, but more can be added to the tank. This is different from a "battery" metaphor, which tends to lead you to think that workers need time away to "recharge." Such a solution is not necessarily true, effective or even possible in some circumstances you may be experiencing.

The good news is that you can effectively fill the gas tank by providing workers

• More control over time and tasks
• More opportunities to improve skills

So here are related techniques that can help you manage a nearly burned-out workforce:

• Avoid workers getting angry or burned out after taking on extra workload by assigning work to those who will see it as a growth opportunity. Promote it as such.
• Determine what workers want in the way of skill-building and career advancement. Provide appropriate access and information. Promote their use and allow flexibility for workers to take advantage of these opportunities, even if it is a little painful. You will long-term benefits.
• Give workers as much as possible control over how and when they do work. Let them assign intermediate due dates for deliverables progress for example.
• Don't blame substandard performance too quickly on worker skill inadequacy or motivation problems. It could be the harder-to-identify symptoms of burnout, especially if seen across departments, divisions or the organization as a whole.
• Avoid communications that make the problem worse. Blanket urges for everyone to work 100% (or more) to get tasks done.

Finally, stay aware of today's business environment where expectations for more work and slow hiring lead to worker burnout. Your previous experience in managing workers may lead you to use incorrect techniques.

It's a brand new year full of hope. And, if you haven't experienced it yet in your project, you better you better hope you don't have to deal with workforce burnout .

According to John Boudreau and Ian Ziskin* in the journal Organizational Dynamics,  workers are "just plain exhausted—physically, emotionally and psychologically."

Recent studies back up this verdict. A recent study of HR professionals found that a large majority saw increased workloads, and for those that did, 40% reported increased health problems and 80% reported lower worker engagement. Employee Assistance Plans (EAPs) are feeling the heat. One experienced a "dramatic" jump in 2011 calls as compared with 2010.

• Workers are suffering with increased workloads as employers put off rehiring even though the amount of work is increasing with economic activity.
• In the IT world, there are just not the resources with the proper expertise available in many cases. Yet business leaders still push for their projects to be completed.

Clinicians agree. Randy Martin, director of clinical services for Harris, Rothenberg International warns you to be aware of your project workers

• grieving for colleagues who have lost jobs,
• having to work more hours without a feeling of job security.

Their stress is spilling over into their marriages and may be causing other unhealthy behaviors such as heavy drinking or gambling.

The bottom line is that workforce burnout prevents sustained performance.

Conduct your own assessment. Have you already been seeing symptoms in your workforce?  Think carefully about the workforce as a whole. What have you seen or heard?

• Are you seeing more outages due to health problems?
• Have you seen a lack of trust in company leaders? Are company leaders still respected? Has a sense of optimism about company leadership been lost?
• Are your workers less likely to give 100% and a little extra in short bursts of effort in critical situations?
• Do your workers appear to building a fort around themselves to preserve a small area they can control?
• Do they often speak about a previous golden age with others who worked with them in the past?
• Are project workers taking days off just to sleep or go to appointments?
• Has there been broad, chronic substandard performance where blame has been laid on as many sources as those who express an opinion?

If you are not sure, or are new and just do not know, check with your HR representative to obtain a climate check on your workforce. Don't be surprised if you get an earful. Your HR department may have already been advising leaders against this trend to no avail.

In my next post, I'll list a variety of tactics things you can use to avoid workforce burnout in your project. Some tactics may surprise you. Would you believe "give them more work"? Stay tuned.

* Links in this post may require registration.

What is the worst that could happen if an IT organization forces workers to work long hours toward one aggressive deadline after another, year after year, led by task master managers with minimal people skills who are just looking to meet the latest numbers? Really, how bad would this be for a company? Would it really suffer significant short- or long-term problems with performance or profitability? Would the company benefit from this strategy?

Wonder no more, thanks to Zynga. Taking  the classic hard-charging silicon valley startup strategy to an extreme, Zynga's leader used his Harvard business school and Wall Street experience to create a data-driven super-meritocracy where the best were heavily rewarded and those who did not meet aggressive targets were marginalized or eliminated.

How did it go? Unlike other start-ups, Zynga became profitable quickly  and grew fast. Some types of employees thrived in this atmosphere. In the early years, the best practices espoused for workforce management looked like they were headed for the dustbin.

The news is different now. And I do mean the news. Zynga and its leader are having their dirty laundry aired in public. Here's what is being reported now.

• Workers are so frustrated they are taking their complaints public
• Business deals are falling through
• The offensive behavior of leaders during these negotiations is being discussed publically by leaders of the other companies
• Zynga faces a talent drain as competitors look to poach workers
• Consultants have been brought in to collect worker input and train managers

Sure, Zynga is at the dark, far end of a spectrum for workforce management techniques, but there is still a lesson for any organization. The more you move in that direction, the more you risk the same results.

How does your workplace stack up?

Employee engagement can be promoted in a variety of policies and practices within an organization. This month's gantthead theme is Change Management and maintaining engagement is critical to achieving success. The problem with maintaining engagement during large changes is that change typically interferes with factors that improve engagement. Here experts list great practices to engage workers, and, for keeping engagement during significant changes, I've derived a couple more useful tactics.

Build Shared Purpose . . . Instead of seeing large change as "the problem," you can take leadership action by communicating a new story:  that there is new competitive threat, marketplace shift or other outside danger and everyone must adjust so that the organization can successfully react. Instead of your project being a part of the problem, it becomes part of the shared purpose that brings everyone together.

Build Feeling of Community . . . Once everyone has a shared purpose, it is time to expand on that foundation. You want to create the feeling that  everyone can work together and  benefit from that relationship. You want them to be working together, not as individual work teams, departments or divisions. For example, promote in project communications

• using the established process which allows all groups to work together efficiently (if this is true, of course)
• using difficulties between groups as opportunities to solve problems immediately to maintain progress
• incidents where groups have worked out difficulties and appaud their efforts
• the availability of social media for use by the project to help participants work togther more closely

A feeling of shared purpose and community innoculates your project from a host of daily annoyances brought about by workers who are working in the same project, but not really together. Engagement is social.