Print Version - Fact Sheet

“Although most companies acknowledge people as their number resource, people systems are generally the last to receive serious attention.” 

Donna R. Neusch and Alan F. Siebenaler in The High Performance Enterprise: Reinventing the People Side of Your Business

Audience:

• Management
• Human Resources

Delivery:

• Project teams that last up to several months

Contact:

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303.730.0018
www.centerod.com

ALIGNING SYSTEMS

Managing the tools of employee commitment

Systems are the formal and informal mechanisms through which an organization coordinates work practices and develops employees. These systems are critical for ensuring that human resources are empowered and used to their utmost capability.

There are times when a company doesn’t want or need to go through an entire redesign process, but it makes sense to evaluate and improve one or more of its systems to better support the mission of the organization or culture the leaders are trying to create.

We will work with managers and HR professionals to design such systems as:

• Definition of roles and responsibilities. How jobs are defined is one of the most basic decisions on which other systems are designed. Often job definitions change in a high performance company because employees take on additional or broader responsibilities. It’s helpful to clarify the purpose, tasks, desired outcomes, skill and training requirements, etc. of each job.
• Training. Designing employee training often follows developing a clear definition of job responsibilities. We help companies assess current training resources, document specific job requirements, create a skills matrix for each job, create training for specific skills, establish tracking and certification, etc. 
• Performance measurement and feedback. We develop performance and feedback systems that include identification of key result areas, metrics, standardized rating scales, means of giving individuals feedback, etc.
• Selection and hiring. Once companies have a good understanding of job requirements they can create a selection and hiring procedures that raise the probability of finding good people. 
• Compensation. Good compensation systems build on the preceding systems. We help companies develop their compensation philosophy, identify individual and team performance factors, and develop systems for base-pay and variable-pay. 
• Information-sharing and communication. This is one of the most important systems that must change to create a high performance organization. Performance improves significantly when employees know what is going on. We help define what information people need as well as how and when they receive it.

There are many others (recognition, progression, policies and procedures, planning and goal-setting, decision-making and so on). Nothing de-motivates employees more than ill-defined or outdated systems. The way systems are designed determines, to a large measure, whether high performance is a concept to which companies pay lip service or whether it is instilled into the day-to-day attitudes and habits of people on the job.