Hygiene factor - superior staff

Following on from last month's article on staff, good business practice and the right knowledge (and stockholding) of a comprehensive product range being the real hygiene factors for any business, Anton Herbst drills down into the first area, namely staff, and gives his opinion on how organisations can build the perfect workforce:

While it's not the only factor for success, any respected business leader will testify to the important role having an employee-base that's of a sufficient size, efficiency-level, morale-level and capability plays in the success of a business, regardless of its target market or space of operation.

In chasing the goal of building the 'perfect staff complement', some organisations lose their way. The market is full of misconceptions about what skills their employee base should have.

One of the most common myths is that the best companies employ the best people and without proverbial 'superstars' in their ranks, they are doomed to fail. This couldn't be further from the truth, as some case studies in the financial services sector have proven.

A couple of years ago, many companies seeking to grow in the investment banking space went after 'superstars' at competing companies in the hope that by getting those people on board, they would see increased success.

Independent research conducted recently revealed some sobering facts. The most startling was that, on average, it took the vast majority of those star performers at least 10 years to get up to the same levels of efficiency and success as what they had achieved at their previous companies. The popular opinion with regard to this was that it wasn't the people themselves that were star performers, but rather the systems, policies and other favourable conditions that were created at their previous company.

It was more about the environment than it was about the people.

ACT sits in very much the same situation as some of those investment banking companies. We're constantly pushing for growth, closer alignment with customer needs and striving to, through our people, deliver the perfect service experience for our customers.

We have realised that simply poaching the star performers in each of the disciplines we have a shortfall in, is not the right solution. While there is probably a wealth of different approaches out there, the one we have chosen is working well for us.

With all due respect to our staff members, ACT's strategy is not to chase the superstars in the market - our strategy does, however, hinge on taking good quality people and creating the right conditions for them to rise to superstardom.

We focus, first and foremost, on building a team of employees with complementary talents. Right from our executives, through to our senior managers and middle-managers, we concentrate on employing people with different strengths. This initially results in a balanced, collective set of abilities that can be evolved through mentorship and training into a 'perfect skills' set for the market.

We're still not there though - we realise there's a long road to travel before we arrive at our end goal, and when we arrive there, the market conditions will have changed such that we will have to continually evolve our workforce.

Companies should also realise (like we have), that despite the 'superstars' not panning out the way they anticipate, filling an organisation with these people may, in fact, be impacting on the rest of the staff quite dramatically. If new employees are earning more, are given a greater share of voice and rewarded differently (all of these things may well be what it takes to bring those superstars into the organisation), the employees within their departments, who have been there for an extended period of time, playing a vital role, may well be discouraged.

To deliver service in the market, a company needs a content and happy workforce, and to build such an environment for staff, one needs to look at their priorities. I'm talking about the things that drive people - and more often than not, it isn't money.

A wealth of research done here and internationally has shown that employees value recognition, knowing they're important to the company and that their opinions matter.

While the approach being applied by ACT generally makes sense to most who hear about it, it's not an easy approach to follow, especially when it comes to building the skills the company will need in the future.

I believe that it's not 'the industry's' job to create skills - it's every company in an industry's role. By relying on 'the industry', no new skills are being created, resulting in all of the employees having the same 'vanilla' skills set.

Just like companies require different skills sets from their employees, so the people in the market have companies they are suited to. Furthermore, every person has a unique path they must follow in order to gain the skills they need to feel complete and to provide value to the organisations they choose to work for.

ACT's approach to creating all of these variables and, at the same time, still build the employee base their strategy will require in the future, is termed the personal development plan, or PDP.

The key to understanding how it works is right there in the word 'personal'.

Everyone has his or her own growth paths and measurements of success. As part of the PDP process, we encourage employees to choose their study path (providing it fits within a role they can fulfil down the line at ACT), assess their own progress and set goals.

Often these goals aren't even academic - they centre on acquiring or learning a new skill - often they're soft-skills.

By taking this route, we feel we're solving a host of challenges. We're upskilling our workforce and empowering them with abilities that ACT and the people working for us need. We are also showing them they matter by virtue of the skills they are acquiring; it's also easier for us to give them share of voice; and lastly, we are able to recognise their achievements. The last time we checked, these were all the things people found to be drivers.

Are we going to lose people? That is entirely possible.

Wouldn't it be nice though if that were not what held organisations back from developing their staff? If every company trained their staff, it would make no difference if they moved to another employer - there would always be another potential employee waiting in the wings.

Creating skills and driving the development of our staff is non-negotiable. We believe that if we create a workforce that's developing and engaged, our customers will notice it. Our ultimate goal is to create a better workforce so our customers benefit from a better experience.