Working Smarter : Human Resources

Getting from Losses to Commitments: The Change Acceptance Cycle

Fred Nickols — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 06:20:00 GMT

The purpose of this post is to review The Change Acceptance Cycle shown in Figure 1 and to extract from it some pointers for managers caught up in organizational change.

The Change Acceptance Cycle

Let’s start in the upper left, with a common form of change, the introduction of new ways or arrangements at work. This might be a new process, a new system, a new policy, a new organization in the wake of a merger, acquisition or a just plain old reorganization.

It is rarely the case that changes are welcomed with open arms; they are almost always seen by some people as having losses attached. The losses might include a position, a title, a personal sense of comfort, a sense of competency, the disruption of personal and working relationships, a fiefdom, or even employment itself. The negative reactions people have to changes, then, aren’t to the changes but to the losses they create.

The initial reaction of many people is one of shock, disbelief, and even disorientation. Their world has been or is about to be turned upside down and they are discombobulated to use a good old-fashioned word.

From there, people try to quickly restore some semblance of rhyme, reason and order to their world, which for some, has been turned upside down. They do this in various ways; by denying the change will occur or will affect them; by dismissing it as inconsequential or irrelevant; and by simply disconnecting from what is going on around them, hunkering down and pretending it isn’t happening.

But reality sets in. Then people have strong emotional reactions. Some get angry, really angry. Some become fearful and are paralyzed by that fear. They don’t know what to do and so they do nothing. Others aren’t necessarily fearful but they do become anxious about what the future holds and this anxiety saps their energy and dominates their thoughts. They wallow in “what if?”

Another stage of emotional reaction is marked by sadness for the loss of what was; perhaps for friends co-workers who have been moved to other areas; perhaps for a loss of confidence rooted in mastery of the old ways that has been displaced by a lack of familiarity with the new ways; and perhaps for the loss of an organizational culture that was once highly valued. Sadness is not far from depression and people can and do become depressed. Often they become passive, like victims awaiting their fate.

Some bog down in one or more of these stages but, sooner or later, most begin to look toward the future. They get their heads up and start looking around. They also start jockeying for position in the new order, bargaining for their personal situations and scrambling to find a place for themselves.

As they begin making their way out of this cycle, they begin to accept whatever they’ve viewed as losses and they begin to accept the new ways, too. They see hope in the future and they begin to commit to the new ways.

Thus it is that people accommodate, adjust to and accept change.

Some Pointers for Managers

The first thing to know is that change and accompanying losses are inseparable. People see what they see and if they see loss there is a loss involved – at least for them. Moreover, people don’t resist change per se; instead, if they resist at all, they resist what they see as loss.

Not all is doom and gloom. Not everyone has a negative reaction to change and the intensity of the reactions people have varies with the change, the person and the perceived loss.

People go through this cycle in very different ways. Some scoot right through it; some plod along one stage at a time; some bog down in one or more stages; some seem to make their way through and out of it but then something knocks them right back into it; and some people seem to move back and forth between one stage and another. The point is that you have to deal with your people as individuals; there are no one-size-fits-all approaches to helping people accept change and its associated losses.

Chances are, in addition to helping your people get through this cycle, you have to go through it yourself. Who will help you? How do you get help? Where are you in the cycle and how do you move on? More specifically, what losses do you and others see as attached to the change? Are they real or imagined? Can you compensate for them or are they givens?

People can and often do help each other. Co-workers can be just as effective as bosses in helping each other make their way through the change acceptance cycle.

So what can you do? Well, for one thing, you can talk about it – with your people, with your peers and with your boss. You can use the cycle diagram in Figure 1 to focus the discussion and to examine the current state of affairs. You need to know where your people are in this cycle. They need to know where you are and where their co-workers are. You need to know where your boss is and your boss needs to know where you and your people are. The diagram gives you a framework for examining, discussing and dealing with the reactions to change and for facilitating the acceptance of change.

A blog post is hardly the place to set forth detailed descriptions for dealing with the many specific techniques for helping people through the cycle of acceptance but it is a perfect place to point you to some very helpful resources. One of the best in this regard is William Bridge’s best-selling book, Managing Transitions (2^nd Edition).

About the Author: My name is Fred Nickols. I am a writer, an independent consultant and a former executive. Visual aids of one kind or another have played a central role in my work for many years. My goals in writing for SmartDraw’s Working Smarter blog are to: (1) provide you with some first-rate content you can’t get anywhere else, (2) illustrate how important good visuals can be in communicating such content and (3) illustrate also the critical role visuals can play in solving the kinds of problems we encounter in the workplace. I encourage you to comment on my posts and to contact me directly if you want to pursue a more in-depth discussion.

Corporate Culture: A Case of Monkey See, Monkey Do?

Fred Nickols — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:42:00 GMT

Did you ever wonder how your company’s culture – that set of beliefs, traditions, and behavioral norms that determines “the way things work around here” – came to be? Or why, when you try to change it, it seems so resistant? Well, here’s a little story about a scientific experiment that shows how culture comes into being and why it is so resistant.

The experimenters began with a cage, a set of externally enforced boundaries. Inside the cage, they hung a banana on a string and placed a set of stairs under it. They then introduced five monkeys into the cage. Before long, one of the monkeys started to climb the stairs toward the banana. As soon as it touched the stairs the experimenters sprayed all the other monkeys with really cold water. When another monkey made an attempt to get the banana they again sprayed the other monkeys with cold water. After a while the monkeys prevented any of their group from going after the banana.

After the cultural prohibition against “going for the banana” had been established the experimenters put away the cold water. They took one of the original monkeys out of the cage and introduced a new one. Upon spotting the banana the new monkey went after it. To its surprise and dismay all of the other monkeys attacked it. After another attempt and attack the new monkey learned that if it tried to climb the stairs and get the banana it would be assaulted and so it stopped going after the banana. It had been acculturated, assimilated into the cage’s “don’t go for the banana” culture.

Next the experimenters removed another of the original five monkeys and replaced it with another new one. The second new monkey went to the stairs and predictably it was attacked. The first new monkey took part in this punishment with enthusiasm! Similarly a third original monkey was replaced with a new one, then a fourth, then the fifth.

Every time the newest monkey took to the stairs it was attacked by the other monkeys. Most of the monkeys that were beating it had no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they were participating in the beating of the newest monkey. After all the original monkeys were replaced none of the remaining monkeys had ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, no monkey ever approached the stairs to try for the banana. Why not? Because as far as they knew: “That's the way it's always been done around here.”

And that is how a company’s culture is formed: Acceptable and unacceptable behaviors are initially established in response to important external events but, over time, all that remains are strongly-held notions about what is and what isn’t acceptable behavior. The origins of these beliefs vanish with the departure of the members of the group who were present when the patterns and standards were initially established. In a long-lived organization, there might be no members left who know why a given behavior is considered acceptable or unacceptable. Yet all members of the organization are quick to enforce whatever the cultural standards might be.

So how do you break out of this culture trap? Well, you start by trying to find out what’s behind those cultural do’s and don’ts. Why is this expected or required? Why is that prohibited? And don’t accept “That’s the way things are done around here” as an answer. In some cases, you might find there are very good reasons for this or that prohibition or requirement. In others you won’t. In all cases, what you’re out to accomplish is to eliminate blind adherence to behavioral norms.

If you want to prevent hardening of the cultural arteries, try this: Every two or three years, conduct a simple cultural audit (see the decision tree below). Identify whatever behavioral norms are at work and determine why they are in place. See if they are still valid. None of this means that all or even any cultural standards will be eliminated; what it does mean is that if they no longer make any sense you can probably do away with them and, if they are to stay in place, people will know why – and your company’s culture will make sense instead of simply being a case of monkey see, monkey do.

Basic Cultural Audit

Understanding Your Company's Performance Architecture

Aaron Stannard — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:05:00 GMT

Responsible Management Practice

We all want to be able to say with some degree of confidence that a given action will produce a given result. Conversely, we also want to be able to say that a given result requires a certain action. Our success depends on being able to identify and make use of the connections between the results we seek and the resources at our disposal. These connections are to be found in what is called an organization’s “performance architecture.” This post defines and briefly explains the three domains of performance making up a company’s performance architecture.

Performance Architecture

The three domains of performance are listed below (see Figure 1):

Financial
Operational
Behavioral

The numbered tabs in Figure 1 represent linkages between the domains.

Each domain of performance has a different structure.

Mapping an organization’s performance architecture creates a roadmap for realizing results. A brief discussion of these three domains follows.

Financial Domain

The structure of the financial domain is mathematical in nature; it is concerned with counted and calculated values (e.g., profit).

The financial domain of a company is defined by its chart of accounts, its accounting systems and the measures of financial performance that are used. The high-level structure of one measure of for-profit business performance – ROE or Return on Equity – is shown in Figure 2.

The financial measures used vary from organization to organization. In one company, Profit as a percent of Sales might be an important measure; in another, that measure doesn’t get much attention but Return on Assets Managed does. A capital-intensive manufacturing organization might be very interested in Return on Invested Capital (ROIC). But professional services firms (e.g., lawyers and consultants) are more likely to be interested in measures of income as well as the profitability of clients and engagements. Publicly traded stock companies might pay attention to earnings per share but that measure is meaningless with respect to a non-profit company. In non-profit organizations retained earnings takes the place of profit and, in turn, contributes to the non-profit’s invested reserves. All organizations use financial measures as gauges of their financial performance.

Tab 1 in the Performance Pyramid (Figure 1) refers to the linkages between the organization’s financial performance and its operational performance. The organization’s chart of accounts, revenue booking, cost allocation mechanisms and financial reports are the best starting points for identifying the linkages between financial and operational performance. The basic task is a matter of selecting a measure and then analyzing its mathematical structure. Carry this analysis deep enough and, sooner or later, financial measures tie to operational variables. Figure 3 shows several levels of detail in the structure of Return on Equity. A sweeping new ad campaign could drive up selling expense and operating expense.

The linkages between financial and operational performance are found in the low-level details of the structure of key financial measures. In Figure 3, arrows point to Cost of Sales and Operating Expense. Further decomposition of these variables would lead through the organization’s chart of accounts and cost accounting system into its operational structures and processes. Cost of Sales ties to Manufacturing Labor Cost and that in turn might well tie to overtime hours which in turn could tie to a poorly designed process (or poorly trained people).

Operational Domain

The structure of the operational domain is physical in nature; it is concerned with stocks and flows, with systems of production, distribution and the like. The operational domain takes the form of processes.

The operational domain consists of two basic kinds of processes: transformation and transaction processes. Transformation processes convert organizational inputs into outputs (e.g., raw materials into finished products). Transaction processes focus on exchanging organizational outputs for new inputs (e.g., selling finished products or services to customers and using the monies received from customers to purchase more materials from suppliers.). Both categories can be viewed as work systems that accomplish the output production and the input acquisition work of the organization. The basic structure of a work system is depicted in Figure 4. It shows that inputs are transformed into outputs as a consequence of interactions between those inputs and the system’s processor (which might be a machine or a human being). Control is exercised over outputs and inputs via feedback loops.

Behavioral Domain

The structure of the behavioral domain is concerned with the factors that determine human behavior and performance.

This is the domain of human behavior and performance. Because people in organizations are there to accomplish the work of the organization, be it output production or input acquisition, two models are useful here. First, the work system model (Figure 4) can be used to examine work processes in which the “processor” is a person. Second, a model that depicts people as purposeful, goal-oriented actors also proves useful when the behavior and performance of people are of central interest. The Target model in Figure 5 is a closed-loop, feedback-controlled model. (A special post will be devoted to examining this model in more detail.)

Tab 2 in the Performance Pyramid (Figure 1) refers to the links between the operational and behavioral domains. People in organizations are process participants; they do work and thus their work products and actions feed directly into the organization’s processes. In many cases, people are the processors.

Conclusion

In organizations, the ends we seek and the means at our disposal are linked through at least three different yet related domains of performance: financial, operational and behavioral. Being able to map and trace our way through the various structures comprising this architecture makes the probability of identifying effective actions much higher than would otherwise be the case.

Does Process Stifle Talent?

Aaron Stannard — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:10:00 GMT

I came across this internal Netflix presentation on freedom & responsibility as a business culture on TechCrunch this morning and it struck a cord with me and many others.

The most interesting part for me (and presumably the rest of my organization) is the costs and benefits process during the growth phase of a company. The Netflix executives who made this presentation argue that process-driven cultures, while effective at creating order from chaos, stifles and eventually drives away talented individuals.

I would argue that even in an organization composed entirely of super-talented individuals there will always be some level of chaos. You will always want a process for deploying a brand new enterprise website, for instance, because the site needs to be deployed uniformly in order to be successful. If you just let your two super-talented IT people do it their own way then you could have a disaster. Process helps ensure that there will be some consistency and order in any key activity, regardless of the talent-level of the people participating.

The bits about process aside, the entire presentation is fascinating - and everyone should read it. I've embedded the presentation below.

Culture

View more presentations from reed2001.

So what are your thoughts? Is Netflix right? Does process stifle talent?

Update: One of the commenters on the original TechCrunch linked to a Glassdoor post former Netflix employees reviewed their experiences with the company and offered an alternative point of view (that of the employee.)

The Seven Traits of Effective Teams

Aaron Stannard — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:47:38 GMT

How many teams have you worked with over the course of your life thus far? You’ve probably worked with dozens, beginning with the sports teams from your youth leading all the way up to your current occupation.

Out of all of those teams, which ones were the most effective? Which teams made the most productive use of their people?

No team is perfect but over the years I’ve worked with a handful of remarkable teams, including my current one here at SmartDraw. I’ve also had to work with some teams that were quite dreadful, to say the least. You’ve probably been in the same boat.

When I decided to write this post I thought back to all of the good and bad teams, and wrote down a list of the positive traits that separated the remarkable teams from the abysmal. Here they are:

Great Communication – As we all know, communication is problematic for most teams. Truly great teams are robust communicators – they express their concerns aloud; they ask questions when others would make assumptions; they write things down; and they use schematics, diagrams, and charts to convey complex information to each other.
Extensive Collaboration – Great teams aren’t authoritarian; there’s no top-down dictation of ideas from leader to follower. Instead great teams are collaborative, where every member is invited and expected to give regular feedback on new ideas and initiatives. People in these teams feel comfortable and free to express what they really think and feel, and they also feel like they own part of the idea.
Full of Initiative – Nothing pleases a manager more than having co-workers who are willing and able to pick up the ball and run with it. Truly exceptional teams often have members who will come up with new ideas, find ways to improve existing ideas, and will perform analysis and research on their own. Having just a few pro-active people on a team makes a huge difference as it exponentially increases the creative energy of the team.
Visionary – Visionary teams do two things really well. First – they can always see the forest from the trees; they understand how the daily details relate back to the big picture and the team’s long-term objectives. Second – they anticipate problems in advance and mitigate them before they become full-blown crises.
Able to Adapt – Poor teams resist change at all cost. They see change as a threat to their security and fight it until they inevitably fail. Great teams embrace change; they see change as a chance to improve and try new things that they were unable to do before.
Constructive – In poor teams people all-too-often embed their own egos in their work, thus it is often difficult to correct errors and provide constructive criticism. When you criticize the work, you criticize the worker (in bad teams.) Team members in high-functioning teams are more interested in producing the best work possible and eliminating errors than they are in preserving fragile egos.
Organized – Great teams are highly organized. They develop standard processes for their work, they balance responsibilities using established roles, they have systems for properly planning projects, and they have methods for measuring progress and ROI. Less effective teams don’t take the time to organize; rather they rely on ad-hoc organization, which is chaotic to say the least.

Of all the traits on my original list I feel that these seven are the most pivotal traits of any high-functioning team. A team that is able to effectively communicate, adapt, collaborate, and innovate together is going to be ultimately more successful than reflexive, command-driven, authoritarian teams in most instances.

What would you add to this list?

P.S. If you’d like to learn about some of the organizational techniques mentioned in this post, check out the following eCourses from the Working Smarter Learning Center:

How to Calculate ROI

Aaron Stannard — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:02:00 GMT

Recently my co-worker Rich asked us all “Why Bother with Return on Investment (ROI)?” As Rich points out, most managers sing the praises of understanding ROI without practicing what they preach. I myself don’t calculate ROI nearly as often as I should, because it’s often difficult to do and sometimes it’s something that falls by the wayside in the midst of the noise and hustle of the workplace.

Return on Investment means a lot of things; it means one thing in the world of accounting, another in the world of financial investments, and it means another in the scope of project management. We’re just managers of one sort or another here at Working Smarter, and we use ROI as a figure to illustrate the costs and benefits of our projects. We find that calculating ROI helps us avoid pitfall projects, helps get our co-workers to buy-in to project ideas, and helps us prioritize how we use our resources.

When I calculate ROI for a project or a new marketing initiative I find that it is extremely helpful for my co-workers, my boss, and the other teams within our organization who might be involved with the project in some way, shape, or form. ROI figures help them buy into the project and help them prioritize their projects accordingly – something with an ostensibly high return on investment will be prioritized ahead of things with uncertain or perceptibly low ROI.

ROI is a simple concept; it’s the total dollar/time return your organization will receive in exchange for undertaking a project or initiative of some sort.

But how do you actually calculate it? How do you accurately calculate the Return on Investment of your projects? Well, I’ll show you – first we need to understand the two dimensions of ROI:

Reduced Costs – The first way a project produces returns is in the form of reduced costs. In this situation you calculate ROI using this formula:
ROI = Change in Operations Cost / Costs of Project
Increased Revenues – The second way a project produces returns is in the form of increased revenues to the organization. If a company decides to invest a ton of effort into developing a new product, the ROI for that new product will be the additional revenue that the project generates less the costs taken to produce and promote that product. You calculate the formula like this:
ROI = Change in Revenue / Costs of Project

We know how to calculate the overall ROI figures now, but what we really need to do is determine how to calculate the individual parts for both formulas. There’s a process for doing this, which I have defined below:

Although it looks complicated, it’s actually not too bad once you learn how to use the right tools to do each step. People have written books on this stuff, so I’m not going to go into extensive detail, but I’ll be able to give you enough to get you started with ROI.

Step 1 – Determine how much Work is Needed to Complete the Project

This is a very, very familiar step for long-time Working Smarter readers – to accurately determine how much work is needed to complete a project, simply decompose the project’s tasks into a series of very small, simple tasks using a mind map.

It’s very difficult to accurately determine how much work is needed to complete a large task; therefore the most accurate way to schedule large tasks and projects is to break them down into groups of small tasks. Here’s a relevant passage from the previous article:

Don’t believe me? Let’s [consider a project] that everyone can relate to: moving from one home to another. Consider these two groups of questions:

How long will it take you to pack up all of your belongings, move them into your car, unload them into your new house, and unpack them?
How long will it take you to do the following:
1. Pack up all of the dishes, silverware and cookware in the kitchen?
2. Pack up all of the delicate China and glassware?
3. Pack up the five-piece dining set?
4. Move the China cabinet into the car and unload it back at the new house?

Most people will find that it is substantially easier to produce more reasonable, reliable figures for the set of questions under item two than under item one. That’s why we strongly recommend using mind maps to leverage this principle.

If you would like to learn more about decomposing projects with mind maps then we highly recommend signing up for How to Manage a Project, our free eCourse which explains the technique in detail.

Step 2 – Determine the Cost of the Work Needed to Complete the Project

You’ve determined all of the tasks and amount of labor needed to complete a project - now you need to calculate the dollar per hour cost of that labor and resources. This part requires some work. Here are components of this step:

Labor wages for new hires / contractors / consultants – Divide the work time between the new hires working on the project, determine the cost per / hour for each employee, and sum all of them up.
Cost of new equipment – If you need to purchase any new equipment for your project, include all of the costs of purchasing that equipment (financing, installation, transportation, etc…) and add that as a cost.
Cost of leases / rentals – If you need to lease equipment for your project, determine the duration of the lease based on your tasks and estimate the cost for that duration. Do this for every rental needed.
Opportunity cost – Many project managers do different things when it comes to opportunity cost, because it’s not a true “dollar cost” that shows up on a financial statement. Opportunity cost is the cost of picking this project over the next best alternative. It’s really an issue that determines your priorities more so than your costs – a project with a high opportunity cost could still produce a positive ROI, but it might be that the next best alternative has a significantly higher ROI. Use this to determine how to use your in-house resources appropriately, such as your employees’ labor and your company-owned equipment.

Step 3 – Calculate Returns

For projects that don’t produce any new revenue you need to determine the extent of the costs eliminated by your project. You can do this by building a “before” workflow and an “after” workflow – study how your company’s processes change before and after the projects are completed.

This is a concept that requires some additional understanding, so I recommend subscribing to our How to Manage a Process eCourse which explains it at length. Once you’ve determine the change in costs, calculate the ROI:

ROI = Change in Revenue / Costs of Project

For projects that generate revenue, do the following:

Determine your target market / persona – determining your target market isn’t easy, particularly if you’re launching a new business. We outlined a simple thought process for determining a target market, but I suspect that many readers will not be satisfied with that explanation. The fact is that marketers will never have 100% of information needed to make a business decision – they have to cope with a lot of ambiguity, and our process is an acknowledgment of that.
The hard part: estimate the worst, average, and best cases for sales – estimating sales is never easy. Marketing isn’t easy. But it has to be done. Write down your set of assumptions for new sales and new revenues, and based on those assumptions and your target market come up with three cases: the worst case, the average cast, and the best case for sales.
Present the sales cases to your team and come up with the “most reasonable” estimate – unless you’re working by yourself, you should always confer with your team to determine if your assumptions are reasonable or not.
Determine the “likely revenue” based upon the “most reasonable” sales estimate – produce an actual dollar amount for your “new revenue” figure.

Once you have all of this information, you can make your calculation:

ROI = Revenue / Costs of Project

ROI calculations aren’t always easy to do, but I’ve given you a guide here that should help many of you get started on the right foot.

If you have an easier, simpler, or more accurate way to calculate ROI then I would be more than thrilled to read it, so please consider contacting me with that information or leaving it in the comments.

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

Five Signs that Your Team is Disorganized

Aaron Stannard — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:12:00 GMT

Good managers by nature are “organized” people—they often are great at organizing their own work and thoughts, but their self-organization rarely carries over to the groups of people who report to them. If disorganization were easy to detect and diagnose, most managers would undoubtedly do something about it—but it’s not.

More often than not, disorganization is something that becomes deeply ingrained into the modus operandi of an organization—managers just assume they need five status meetings a week with their team because that’s how they’ve always done things. They assume they routinely need to tell their team members where they can find important documents because that’s the way things have always been.

Disorganization becomes part of the organization if it’s allowed to linger for too long, and this costs the organization thousands upon thousands of dollars of lost employee time or other resources over several years.

So how do you know if your business is suffering from endemic disorganization? How can you spot the organizational deficiencies which eat away at your time and money? Here are the five tell-tale signs that your team is disorganized:

You constantly have to explain who, what, when, where, why, and how to your team. Even though your team has been doing this for years now, every time you ask them to do something, they bombard you with questions you’ve undoubtedly heard before. “Where do we need to go?” “What do we need to do?” “How are we supposed to do it again?” And so forth. This indicates that your team or business is organizationally challenged when it comes to training and explaining new processes to team members.
Inconsistent results. If you ask your team to do the same thing twice, you get two completely different results; chances are your team needs better organization when it comes to quality assurance and oversight—someone needs to review work and provide honest feedback as to what the team is doing well or poorly.
Some tasks routinely take significantly more time to complete than they should. It shouldn’t take five days to answer a customer’s tech support request; it shouldn’t take ten days to ship on order; and it shouldn’t take two hours to upload a webpage. If some of your organization’s tasks take an inexplicably long time to complete, the processes used to complete those tasks are the root cause of the organizational problem—lack of process is usually the culprit in these instances.
Key documents / items / information routinely go missing. Your team members have a lot of trouble remembering where key pieces of information or pieces of equipment are placed. “Where’s the key for the forklift?” “Where’s last year’s shipping manifest?” And so forth. This indicates that your team has a difficult time organizing and documenting its resources, whether they are material resources or informational.
Errors occur frequently. Things seem to go wrong and they go wrong often. This can be caused by a number of organizational issues, the most common of which is “roles and responsibilities.” Disorganized teams tend to err frequently because nobody feels that they truly own their work; thus, they feel as though any errors that occur are “somebody else’s problem.” This occurs because the roles and responsibilities of each team member are unclear or undefined.

If you recognize any of these five signs within your own team then you know you’ve got a problem with organization. What can do you to start correcting it? The first place to start is to analyze your existing processes and identify the trouble spots.

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

Three New eCourses to Help You Recession-Proof Your Business Now

Aaron Stannard — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:59:00 GMT

Economic times are tough, and will be for a while. Now is the time to cut fat without cutting muscle. But how do you actually do it?

Well, fortunately we have three new eCourses which will help provide you with some basic ideas on how you can:

Cut operating costs without cutting output;
Prevent projects from running over-budget;
And maintain or even increase sales despite the recession.

As regular Working Smarter readers are aware, we launched what we promised would be “the first of many” eCourses in December 2008. Today we’re announcing three more additional eCourses that are available to the public, for free. Here they are:

How to Manage a Project

A lesson that we have often repeated on Working Smarter time and time again is that most projects run late because they are not managed sufficiently. We’ve compiled all of our advice regarding project management into a single eCourse which will help provide you with a clear idea on how to:

Properly decompose tasks;
Schedule tasks using a Gantt Chart;
Assign the right people to the right tasks;
And measure progress using milestones.

If this is something you might be interested in, click here to sign up for How to Manage a Project.

How to Optimize a Business Process

One of the best things you can do to help soften the recession’s blow to your company is to streamline your operations using standard business processes. Streamlined operations help your company cut costs without adversely affecting output by:

Ensuring that all team members are using the most efficient method possible to do their work;
Making the output of all work more consistent, also enabling you to quantifiably measure the quality of your output;
Making it easier for you train new employees or cross-train old ones;
And making it easier for you to identify production bottlenecks.

Like project management, this is a subject that we’ve blogged about frequently on Working Smarter. We’ve gotten a lot of customer feedback on the subject and much of it has been incorporated into this eCourse. So if you’re interested, click here to sign up for How to Optimize a Business Process.

How to Manage a Sales Process

The most visible effect of the recession is the slide in consumer confidence, which ultimately reduces sales. This last “recession-proofing” eCourse that we’ve developed is an adaptation of our How to Optimize a Business Process eCourse, which goes through a sales process in detail and demonstrates how you can optimize it to close more sales despite a decreased number of leads.

Click here to sign up for How to Manage a Sales Process.

About Working Smarter’s eCourses

All of our eCourses are free and delivered via email. You will receive the first lesson immediately upon sign-up and you should receive the others via email every two to three days, until you have read all of the lessons. If you would like to skip ahead to read other lessons immediately, you can do so.

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

What Do You Do When There Are Not Enough People to Get the Work Done?

Aaron Stannard — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 16:19:00 GMT

In our previous article, we discussed the unpleasant business of playing “what if?” with your organization and determining how to rearrange your workforce as a result of downsizing. In this entry, we explore how to attempt to maintain a consistent level of pre-downsize output, despite the decreased size of the workforce.

So what do you do when there are simply not enough people to get all of your work done? Your workforce is no longer as large as it once was, but the workload remains unchanged. What do you do?

The last thing you’d want to do is scale back core activities and effectively downsize your entire business. Instead, there are three things that you should do:

Cut “Loser” Projects

Core activities should never cease, but you as a manager should immediately identify a number of “loser” projects to eliminate from your team’s workload. Projects are typically new initiatives that are not considered to be a “core activity” until they have demonstrated that they can create positive returns.

“Loser” projects must be cut, and they fall into one of two camps:

Projects that will never be able to realistically provide a return
And projects that will generate returns but simply cost too much to implement during the current unstable economic climate.

It’s easy to spot projects in the first camp; they’re the byproduct of traditional, vague, ineffective project management techniques.

For example, a project is projected to take one month to complete at a cost of $50,000 dollars and it will produce $10,000 worth of savings per month from that point onward. Sounds great on paper, but it’s been four months and the project has cost $200,000 thus far—and it’s expected to take another two months to complete. So instead of paying for itself in five months, the project will pay for itself in 30 months. But by then, the problem solved by this project will probably be a non-issue, so this project is never going to produce a real return. It’s a loser. Cut it.

The second type of project that needs to be cut is the one that will eventually produce a positive return, but have an upfront cost that is simply too expensive under the new circumstances. If you have a project which will take four members of your eight-person team 12 months to complete and 36 months to pay for itself with new revenue generated, then you really should consider cutting the project—under the circumstances, you don’t have time to wait.

Spread Responsibilities and Cross-Train Remaining Employees

In our example from our recent post, we downsized from this organizational chart:

To this one:

Our marketing communications (MarCom) department lost a mid-level manager, a graphic artist, and a webmaster. We have seven people to complete the work of ten—what do we do?

One approach is to cross-train employees to fulfill multiple roles in your organization. Let’s use an example:

Robert the copywriter does a decent job, but he spends a lot of his time waiting on his manager and the technical writer. Robert has demonstrated some layout and design potential in the past; he could be trained in a reasonably short period of time to pick up some of the graphic design responsibilities that belonged to Basil, who was recently terminated.

Cross-training is simply a method of load-balancing the workload on your remaining employees by having them apply their proficiencies in new areas of responsibility. In particular, you should consider cross-training employees who have large amounts of “wait time” or “dead time” between assignments.

Standardize Best Practices

The final technique for getting by with less people is one that we have harped on constantly throughout the lifespan of this blog: take the best practices for completing core tasks in your operations and make them standard operating procedures for all employees.

Streamlining best practices allows you to increase the productivity of every employee substantially and helps you maintain a steady level of output, despite the decreased size of your workforce.

Even though it may be challenging to maintain a consistent level of output in the wake of a downsizing, it’s far from impossible. Managers simply need to look for opportunities to cut bad projects, rebalance their teams' workloads, determine what the best practices are, and standardize them.

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.