Tag Archives: re-skilling
Frankfurt Airport, Fish-hooks and Job Design
Imagine the scene. Frankfurt airport was snowbound and closed all Thursday evening. It was Friday afternoon. Runways had just been cleared of snow. Flights had resumed at 2:00pm. The queues were huge. Two hundred people queued for the security check. One German security guy hurled bags and coats on the belt. Two security operatives patted down when everyone invariably failed the magnetic screen. And one lone guy manned the X-Ray machine. He progressively failed the bags and selected well over half for further analysis. He left his post by the X-Ray machine and opened each bag. He selected shoes, PCs and handbags and marched the owners to the swab analyser 15 metres away to spend three minutes with each passenger to clear them. That done, he wandered back his X-Ray machine to resume scanning. And all while his colleagues and two hundred passengers waited.
So HOW did this mess happen? How was it that two hundred passengers swore and gnashed teeth? It happened because the manager watching this fiasco did not understand the basics of job design. This short blog shows how an SME manager can analyse his or her organisation. It shows how the manager can optimise the various jobs so that competences are balanced across teams. That done the horrendous Frankfurt inefficiency can be avoided.
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Moving Mountains: re-skilling the firm Part II
A previous post on the subject of staff development discussed how to establish through gap analysis the competences that need improvement in the firm. This post disuses how the SME principal might go about bridging these gaps with planned development activity. It also discusses the levels of success that one might hope for in making large-scale staff development change – just how big a mountain can one move?
Moving mountains: re-skilling the firm Part I
What does a firm do when the principal realises that the market has changed and his firm is not now best placed to meet the customer’s needs? What does a firm do to sustain competitive advantage through its people when those people as a whole are not up to par?
These are issues that face many firms today. Many were oriented and organised to meet the needs of an old paradigm, an old market state that was more tolerant of shortcomings and less fast-moving. In many segments, customers demand more service, higher reliability and more immediate response. It prompts some principals to lament that their people are no longer up there with the best. But what does a principal do?
