How does that manager express the traits and abilities of candidates such that the search turns up truly viable candidates?  If the search turns up less-than-ideal folk and the interview process selects the ‘best of a bad bunch’, that wastes everyone’s time and reduces the firm’s turnover and profits. How then does one avoid time wasting and get a viable pool of candidates right from the start?  

A Well Developed Specification

There’s a parallel here with the design and development of product.  No firm starts product design without a well-developed specification considering all the other products and services offered by the firm and offered by competitors.  So using that analogy, what’s the equivalent of a specification in recruitment and selection?

First let’s consider what it’s not.  It’s not a simple discussion with the MD.  That might be part of it but there is a much more precise approach that mirrors the world of product design.  To determine what it is, it’s worth looking at the world of quality and quality in design to ask ‘what gives us a quality product?’  The answer is to specify what’s needed, design just that and then prove that it’s done.  That’s determinism at its best.

Defining Human Behaviour

Over the past century, those in organisational psychology (and that includes human resource management consultants) have developed accurate ways of describing people and the behaviours that they bring to the workplace.  These behaviours then cause outcomes in the firm’s operations. It’s these outcomes, and the behaviours that cause them, that we need to specify.

So how do we proceed?  Everything starts with the P&L account and the business plan that the firm is committed to.  A sub-set of that business plan is the competency framework.  Competencies lead to behaviours through the motivation of management.  A competency framework defines all the competencies needed in the firm.  If someone new is needed, their competencies will be apparent.  Defined competencies spawn a specification for the person to be recruited.

Competencies?

And what do we mean by competencies?  Competencies are bound up in an employee’s traits and abilities, both definable using personality and ability profiles that describe traits like conscientiousness and then describing abilities that measure how folk think, learn and solve problems.  Continuing the design analogy, if you can say what you want in a role and define the ‘specification’ of the person who might fill it, the design of the ‘person’ (the search and selection in the recruitment case) will be a whole load more successful – deterministic in fact!

In deterministic recruitment the specification of the person needed is fundamental to success.  Call us for more of what we can do to ensure you get recruitment right first time.

Buying a Firm

First, there are three reasons why someone might buy a firm: for the intellectual property (IP) in its products, for access to its markets or for its people and their knowledge and skills.  There are firms who make it their business to buy others and strip the assets.  A good example is where a firm is bought for its customers and the purchaser uses the newly acquired brand and distribution chain to market its products  and increase its turnover.  It doesn’t need the staff to do this.  Another example is where a firm owns significant IP tied up in patents and designs.  A buyer can exploit these without the staff.  If firms are left to pursue their own narrow self-interest, there will be many cases where they will pick up the desirable assets and dump the staff.

The Labour Market

Secondly, the population of employees and employers behave as a market, offering skills and knowledge in return for payment and benefit.  For the labour market  to function well it’s important that both parties enter contracts as free agents and commit to one another for a time.  The labour market is governed by the laws of supply and demand and is left, as far as is possible, free of government meddling.  Anything else would a distortion and would be unwelcome.  In extreme cases markets can fail.  Instances where firms buy other firms and prematurely dump the staff in favour of other assets is such a failure.  Governments regulate to prevent failure.  The TUPE regulations are the result.

Protecting Employment

The idea behind TUPE, the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations, is to protect an employee’s employment in circumstances where an employer decides to sell their firm or otherwise ‘transfer the undertaking’ to another thereby materially affecting the employment of the staff.  The simple way to tell if TUPE applies is to think ‘is this an instance where, being fair and reasonable, the employee’s employment should be protected?’  In other words, where it would not be judged fair that an employee loses their job just because the employer decides to sell up or transfer his or her interests.

Where to from here?

If TUPE applies then there are regulations that must be complied with and these act to sustain the employee’s employment during and after the transfer.  Managing under TUPE requires buyer and seller to test if the regulations apply to their transfer situation.  They then need to consider the implications of the regulations.  TUPE also applies to certain instances when supply contracts transfer.

The key issue is to call us early if considering transferring undertakings or supply contracts.  For those on TimelessSUPPORT, there’s more in the Members’ area of this site.  Use your normal username and password to access.

Whilst we can’t really help individuals  - we only work with employers –  it got me thinking.  Why are employees phoning us?  Does it mean that firms are not running redundancy processes correctly?  They’re clearly not TimelessTime clients!  Perhaps guidelines are needed to ease the process.    Based on that, here are six top tips on handling staff in a redundancy situation.

1. Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you told them
Employees will be scared, upset, angry and confused when told they are at risk of redundancy.  They don’t hear all that they are told and the rumour mill will be running at full speed.  Open communications are very important.  Let staff know who they can talk to, and make it clear that they can ask questions at any point.  Don’t make them wait for a formal meeting.

2. Explain the need for the restructure
Whilst employees may not like what they hear, they will be more likely to accept it if they understand the reason.  If a firm is going through a sticky patch and needs to downsize, this will already be apparent to staff before any formal restructure is announced.  Tell employees what the restructuring will do for the firm – you must give hope to those who will remain.  Many firms lurch from one round of redundancies to the next.  Do your homework and get the restructuring right first time.

3. Follow the process
There is a set process that must be followed when undertaking any redundancy and you should have this captured within your company procedures.  If this is not done, you leave yourself open to shouts of unfair dismissal and tribunals can automatically judge a redundancy unfair if you don’t follow your own process.  By following the process, you will ensure that you provide your employees with the relevant information at the appropriate time.

4. Select fairly and transparently
Selecting who will go is difficult.  Who to select, how to select?  The selection criteria used will be determined by the requirements of the restructure and the competencies needed to support the on-going business.  Having determined the competencies needed in the new structure it will become clear which roles are important.  Make a list and measure everyone in the group against the criteria.   Those with the least points are the employees who will be placed at risk and may ultimately be made redundant.  See our blog entitled Demystifying Mixed Contract Redundancies for a definition of redundancy and for more detail at this stage.

5. Provide support
Many people that are to be made redundant will have been out of the jobs market for many years.  For some it may be an opportunity to stop work altogether, for others they will need to find a new role.  As an employer, you can help in several ways. You can provide a ‘job shop’ run externally to provide CV development, interview skills training and personality and ability testing to help employees understand their strengths and prepare them for employment outside your firm.  The support you give staff that you make redundant will reflect on you as an employer on both those leaving and those staying.

6. Remember those employees who have been made redundant are ambassadors of your firm.
Whether you like it or not employees who leave you will have a strong opinion about you as a manager and you as a firm.   It’s a fact of life that people love to communicate negative information to anyone who’ll listen.  Don’t give people the opportunity to ‘bad mouth’ your firm.  One person out there being uncomplimentary about your firm is one too many! Mount a PR campaign to tell the truth – that you are sorry to have to let folk go, that you are providing all possible assistance to those made redundant and that the firm is now set fair for future prosperity.  Do make sure however, that it is all true!

This blog doesn’t tell you how to go about the whole process.  Rather, it’s been written as a list of things that are important to employees.  My advice to you is don’t get caught up in the moment – determine a process and follow the process completely.  Every manager needs to make changes in their firm at some stage or other, and that may mean shedding heads.  But this can be done in a sensitive and fair manner.  A sensitive and fair approach will avoid the need for your employees to ask ‘why me?’ and then ‘am I being treated fairly?’ followed swiftly by ‘can I take a case to Employment Tribunal?’.

If you would like TimelessTime to support your restructure, including job shop provision give us a call on 01825 724179.

From a Legal Perspective

This problem is a minefield.  Whilst a bit negative, the legal approach to the discussion has to be to ask “how do I minimise the chance of this ending in Tribunal”.  Every option needs to be evaluated with this in mind.

First a definition.  Redundancy literally means that a firm finds that it has a ‘diminished need for work of a particular kind’. This is a very important phrase because both ‘diminished need’ and ‘work of a particular kind’ have specific meanings.  In making roles redundant, the employer needs to be able to show that there is a link between the future performance of the firm and the roles employed and that there is truly a diminished need for particular types of roles.  No tribunal can comment on business decisions but there must be business justification for the redundancies.  In making roles redundant, the employer needs to consider all comparable employees in a pool from which a selection is made – each pool must comprise all those doing a particular kind of work, whatever their contractual relationship with the firm.

Statutes and Regulations

There are five statutes or regulations that bear on the case of mixed contract redundancies.  One Act demands that men and women are treated equally: take care here because most part-timers are women.  By making part-timers redundant first, businesses can be acting in a discriminatory way.  Two other statutes demand equal treatment for folk working through agencies.

Two regulations demand that part-timers and temps cannot be treated less favourably than full-time permanent staff.  If, at the point when considering redundancies, these three contract types are employed in comparable jobs, all must be included in the pool and considered together. Of course it would be logical to dismiss the temps first by simply not renewing their contracts but care needs to be taken to ensure that the dismissal and the redundancies don’t coincide or the temps may have a case for unfair dismissal.

There are also additional regulations that apply when 20 or more people are to be made redundant within a ninety day period or where one business is being acquired by another business.

Deciding Who Goes

Going forward the firm needs to have a clear strategy and to meet future objectives the firm needs competence.  The competence of each worker is described by their skills, knowledge and attitudes. The criteria used to decide who from each pool is to go needs to be as objective as possible (and based on evidence rather than supposition and hearsay) and should be based mostly on competence.

The simplest way of deciding is to list the total set of competences needed to perform the role and score each worker against each competence.  Those with the lowest scores, in that pool of staff, are then made redundant.

Conclusion

Using agency workers, temps and part-timers are all attractive economic alternatives to full-time staff and give what is potentially an essential flexibility.  Management does need to be aware that in recent years UK Government has bolstered the employment rights of such workers, aiming to avoid their treatment as a variable cost on the P&L, to be hired and fired whenever the situation demanded corrective action.

Whilst such change seems like a move to the detriment of employers, all it really means is that management need to think more when taking on staff and take a bit more care when it comes to shedding heads.  The last ten years of legislation has not remove management’s right to manage.

Training for most is a fragmented activity – SMEs don’t have departments looking after staff development.  The interested parties – manager, trainee, trainer and shareholder – are likely to be separate entities or well separated departments.  So how does a manager proceed and how far can he or she go to evaluate training and decide whether a particular training intervention is worthwhile?

Hierarchy of Evaluation

The first and most basic evaluation, expression of reaction to the course (through ‘happy sheets’ or post-course questionnaires), requires only the trainee.  Assessment of the learning achieved by the trainee can be done and only needs trainee and trainer to agree what has been learned perhaps though post-course tests.  Ultimately, the manager isn’t interested in reaction or learning though.  He or she wants behaviour change in the trainee.  Learning does not automatically get converted into changed behaviour.  Assessment of behaviour change needs manager, trainer and trainee to view the trainee in the work environment.

But it’s not enough to hear there’s been learning or to see behaviour change.  For a true return on investment to be apparent, training must change the key performance indicators of the firm for the better.  The ultimate in training evaluation – translation of training into change in the firm’s profits – needs manager and shareholder to agree that there has been an incremental change in business position.  Evaluating the effects of training properly is a complex business and if it’s to be done so that return on investment can be determined it needs coordination between manager, trainee, trainer and shareholder.  But the more coordination needed, the more energy needed, so most trainers and managers settle at the level that needs least effort – the happy sheet.  Anything else is just too much trouble.

The Time It All Takes

To evaluate training the stakeholders also need time.  It takes a moment at the end of the intervention for the trainee to give their reaction to the course.  Learning takes some hours to measure (if only to complete a questionnaire or test about what the trainee learned).  For behaviour one needs to observe the trained employee over time and compare their behaviour before and after training.  And to see results on the bottom line takes months if not years and there’s so much more influencing profit that it’s hugely difficult to attribute improvement to some training intervention months before.

Whilst every manager will agree that they sponsor training in order to improve the business position, all would agree that it is difficult ultimately to attribute desired change to any one event.   The result is that organisations, and in particular SMEs, will stick to evaluating reaction and maybe learning.  Business moves too fast to put time and effort in to evaluate behaviour change and change in business position.  Managers have a hunch that training is a good thing but they’re in no way going to spend the effort to prove it.

And in Conclusion

Even if transfer from planned learning-points on a training course to workplace behaviour change and increased profits is only 10% efficient, managers will accept such inefficiency, because to get it to 20% takes just too much energy.  Until better methods of evaluation are found, they’ll rest with the idea that because trainees enjoyed the course, learning took place and that naturally this will be applied in the workplace and result in improved profits.

But who’s right and how should UK approach its skills training?

In Germany and the USA

Germany has a very distinctive and valued technician skill-level vocational training managed by the famous German partnership between management and unions.  The German vocational system is legendary.  So too the liberal markets system (in USA and Canada), where there is much less emphasis on vocational middle range skills and more on producing bachelors level graduates.  Under state control Korea went rapidly from having a strong technician sector providing middle range skills (emulating Germany) to having a strong graduate system (emulating USA and Canada).  So what’s best for these nation-states?  Who’s right?

In Korea and China

The important thing about Korea is a) that the change it made mirrored the change in its product markets and b) that the change was state-directed in response to its changing economy.  In the late 90s, Korea started to lose out to Philippines and Indonesia and then ultimately China in providing low cost manufacturing.  There are many references to this shift: Korean workers wanted more and quite quickly this rapidly industrialising country moved from low to high wages (for at least half the population).  This model has been followed by many countries and commentators consider that China will eventually go the same way.  It’s just that there are more of them so it will happen region by region there.

What’s Best for UK?

The question might be re-phrased: what type of global markets will exist for Britain in the coming years and hence what skills will be needed?  A fatalist would no doubt say that the drift in UK from technician skills training gained via apprenticeships to graduate theory-centred qualifications has simply followed our loss of manufacturing and growth of service.  That suggests that we don’t need technicians any more.  We need graduates to design the knowledge-based systems for low-skill, low cost workers to sit in front of and drive.  Korea’s dual-track employment system mirrors this and that’s the way they went.

If Britain’s economy is going to remain as it is now, we will need the foundation training/tertiary education system that we currently have – the only thing we have that’s different from Korea is that many of our low-wage workers are got through migration from poorer member states of the European Union.

Do you have an opinion on this?  Why not contribute by posting a reply?

This suggests that if the learner has many mental models and the competence to link the models, they can re-build models for many scenarios. Given this, what is then needed is a feedback process to make use of errors to refine the mental model for the task in hand.

Learning to Drive

We might see this apply to car driving. Give the keys to a baby and say “drive me home” and you won’t get much success. The learner has few mental models. Give the keys to teenager with some idea of what an engine is and how to steer and some idea of brakes and gearbox and it won’t take too long and too many errors before they can drive relatively safely. The teenager has reasonably well developed mental models and just needs to rebuild what he or she has, perhaps through EMT.  And that’s before we consider that they’ve already played Grand Theft Auto!!

Software Engineering

There are parallels here with modern software engineering. The traditional life-cycle model for a project requires a requirements elicitation (a software ‘training needs analysis’) at the beginning and then the building of the software in a structured fashion to meet this requirement definition. The momentous failures of software projects has led to alternative approaches. One alternative is to recognise that comprehensive requirement definition is often not possible.  Here software engineers use a process similar to EMT to produce an example (a model), gain criticism from users and correct the example to produce a new model. This process continues for many weeks, until eventually a compliant software solution results. The process is known as ‘agile software engineering’ and requires only that there is a clear vision of the goals.

Like EMT it is perhaps relevant in some projects and not in others and where relevant it is both efficient and effective.

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[1] Keith, N., & Frese, M. (2008). Effectiveness of error management training: a meta-analysis. The Journal of applied psychology, 93(1), 59-69.

The maximum number of negative feedback points that should be received by any individual at any one time is two so this flags a danger in multi-rater systems.  The mechanism of self-assessment and the way feedback is processed and used by appraisees is also interesting.  Many practitioners comment that appraisees may respond to feedback received formally or informally, and one response is to leave the firm.

There are two uses of rating by self or others – firstly for the laying down of personal development plans and secondly for staff and manager appraisal (the latter possibly linked to reward).  Each has a very different focus.  Where MSMR systems have been implemented for appraisal, most have been abandoned within two years.  One of the difficulties cited by many firms is the sheer size of the task.

This balance of pros and cons leads to an obvious conclusion that as far as performance appraisal goes, there is really nothing that can beat a downward appraisal based initially on self-assessment where both appraiser and appraise have had suitable training – the boss on facilitating discussion and the subordinate on self-appraisal.  Overall, MSMR appraisals don’t cut it when the cost and risks are considered – costs outweigh benefits.   And whilst self-appraisal can be lenient (when compared with other directions), this is corrected somewhat by training in self-assessment techniques.

The use of MSMR for development purposes on the other hand has potentially a long and useful life ahead.

Do you have an opinion about appraisals and staff development?  Why not leave a reply?

Academics’ View

Secondly, academics suggest that training professionals are under-qualified. In most other areas of science and technology there is a structure which ‘naturally’ accepts diffusion of new ideas. In engineering, academics pass knowledge to engineers. Engineers structure the world for technicians and technicians manage fitters. Knowledge diffuses from research to application. Fitters talk a different language to academics and no diffusion would occur unless other levels translate it. Is one threat to training and development perhaps to do with a poor diffusion structure?

No Off-the-Shelf Here!

And finally some academics point to the dangers of defining training and development too narrowly saying “trainers offering off-the-shelf-courses is not what a modern organisation needs”. This suggests that in the future training must offer true intervention with training and change management almost becoming synonymous. Trainers should behave as consultants engaging in high-end strategies such as mental model development and virtual reality. If trainers are indeed under-qualified with poor diffusion structure in the discipline, this suggests that training will not meet organisation expectations in the future.

Economists’ View

Ultimately, firms are faced with a “make or buy decision”.  This idea of make-or-buy comes from economics.  The Coase Theorem says that firms will develop their staff only if they can achieve the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed cheaper than making staff redundant and recruiting new.  If training does not become better regarded, firms will be faced with Hobson’s choice and treat staff as a variable cost, changing out rather than up-skilling.

Do you have a view on the future of training?  Why not leave a reply?

There are two essentials to success: systematising operations and having competent staff and managers.  Both drive competitive advantage.

Competitive Advantage

Competitive advantage comes from reduced costs (allowing price flexibility) and differentiated products and services (such that customers will buy).  Competitive advantage also comes from people; people driving systems that allow efficiency, high productivity and opportunity for improvement.  And people engaged in innovation leads to new, highly desirable products.  So how does one achieve competitive advantage?

Possible Vehicles

There are two possible vehicles – ISO9001 and Investors in People (IiP) – both often wrongly considered as ‘big company PR activities’.  The former demands that management sets out the way it wants the firm to run and then is able to prove to an assessor that it does indeed run that way.  The latter asks management to determine strategy, measure current and desired competences and train staff to bridge the competence gap to meet that strategy.  As research at Cranfield University shows, working towards such standards “triggers a chain of events” that leads to higher organisational capability and better management performance.

Costs

Both ISO9001 and IiP can be achieved for relatively little cost.    With a bit of knowledge and a good plan, all firms can achieve these standards and with them the huge organisational benefits that systematised operations and developed staff and managers bring.  It might even bring some ‘small company PR’ too!