Engage your critical employees..

I came across this very interesting article in McKinsey Quarterly focusing on engaging critical employees in the organization. It speaks about mapping the probability of an employee leaving the organization vs. the difficulty in replacing him/her. Essentially, it talks of a matrix that looks somewhat like this:

So what this is saying is that an employee falling in the red zone has a higher probability of leaving the organization (based on factors such as market demand, salary trends, family situation etc.) and it will also be very difficult to replace him / her.

We tried to implement this in our organization but came across some roadblocks. We found that somehow the criticality of the role that was being played by our employee was getting missed out. We wanted to get in the job role aspect rather than only focusing on the person. This was because we were not sure of skills being the only differentiating factor. We tweaked the matrix as follows:

This gave us an idea of how important the person was to us with regard to the work that he was performing and his/her Replaceability. The definitions for the boxes in the matrix were tweaked to build in the probability of the person leaving and the difficulty in replacing him/her.

This is a great tool to help your line managers engage in discussions and help them understand each of their subordinates in a deeper manner. This gives great insights into identifying the motivational anchors of the team and these can then be clubbed together to identify themes on engagement. In this particular case, this matrix was used for succession planning in the organization to identify and keep a ready pipeline for the ‘red box’ positions / persons. 

Impact of a frustrated employee

While we have all heard of one-off extreme (and violent) reactions of a frustrated employee in office, most times things don’t reach that level and people leave. However, I have seen organizations trying to retain employees in the guise of performance even when they know that the mere presence of the frustrated employee is not good for the rest of the team. These are just some of the effects that a frustrated employee might have on others:

- Negativity – A frustrated employee is a constant cribber. He would rather see the glass half empty than half full. This becomes a habit and co-workers are fed on constant negativity and how things are bad in the organization. It takes a very mature co-worker to filter this barrage of negativity flowing round the clock.

- Going slow on work – A frustrated employee does not see value in the work he/she is doing. Hence, his/her productivity goes down and the delivery expected almost never happens on time.

- Glorifying what’s happening outside – A frustrated employee starts comparing and pointing out the perks / benefits available in other organizations vs. yours. This in turn inspires and makes other employees think that the grass is greener outside.

- Inspiring others to leave – A frustrated employee might even start helping others in their job search thereby aiming at inflicting maximum harm to the organization.

A frustrated employee aims at vitiating the atmosphere in the office. Considering the fact that we end up spending most of our awake time in office with the same set of people, is it not logical on the part of organizations to let go off such employees rather than persisting with them?

Weaving your Work Web

While I generally find seminars and classroom training programs a drab affair, I recently attended a 3 day training program where a few concepts were implementable. The trainer spoke about the complexity of the informal organization and how important it is to build your own network inside as well as outside your organization.

While this might sound obvious, its easier said than done. And the more difficult part is to track and understand how big and strong your network is. Adapted from “How to Manage” by Jo Owen, there are certain role definitions for each member in your network. Classify your contacts as follws:

Informers – Sources of vital information, trends and developments. They know what is going on, so you ought to have as many as possible.

Connectors – Open doors and connect you to others. These are people who know people. These may come from your business as well as social network.

Sponsors – People with power and influence and can be relied upon for support when required. Essential for leverage.

Promoters – are your supporters and increase your visibility by advertising your strengths

Advisors – provide guidance and feedback on your development plans (both business as well as personal).

Experts – People with specialist expertise to complement your own and can provide argument in your own area. These can also be useful when you need to get buy in from groups with a specialist background different from yours.

The classification is not as easy as I thought it was and found that there was a lot of overlap in terms of one person falling in more than one classification. However, try and keep away from one person appearing more than once.

Use the following circle to understand your own web network. This will give you an idea of who are the people you hang out with and where all you need to develop in terms of making a more intricate web of people.

We will need 3 different colored pens :

- Put your name in the centre of the circle
- Use a red line for someone who is not very critical in your web ending with the name of the person
- Use an amber line for someone who is critical to your web ending with the name of the person
- Use a green line for someone who is extremely critical to your web ending with the name of the person
- The length of the line denotes the strength of the relation you share. A name close to the circle denotes a close relation.

Once you are through with this exercise, your web might look something like this. I have omitted the names for clarity and put an initial as an example:

This gives us a clear idea of the following:

- The uniqueness of our network and the areas where we need our network to develop
- Which are the relationships that we need to work upon and are essential for our long term success
- The relationships that we take for granted and understand their criticality in our success.

Your network can be reviewed every 6 months and updated to see what progress you have made in developing your own work-wide web.

For me, my first insight was that I hardly had anyone in the Advisors box. And I have started to work on developing some of them for myself. And I also made a few calls to rejig my old boys’ network…:D