| | By Mick James
Are people your
greatest asset? Do you
strive to create
work-life balance? Is
your workforce fully
incentivised to achieve
peak performance. I can
rarely leave interviews
these days without
learning these and other
exciting facts from the
people who run
businesses. The only
problem with this new
world of work is that
most of the actual
employees I run into
seem to be the same old
sad sacks as ever.
During my
all-too-brief stint as a
manager I found myself
in a state of perpetual
warfare with my
superiors, and most of
it was over the
treatment of people. All
too often I felt I was
being asked to manage
the wrong things. Why
was I asked to manage
people’s time instead of
their energy, to focus
on their inputs instead
of their outputs? Why
was there so little
feeling of mutuality
between the workforce
and its ultimate
employers? My senior
management seemed to see
the workers not so much
as fellow colleagues but
a treasonous rabble
found in larcenous
possession of company
time. Yet, although we
offered them nothing to
inspire their loyalty we
became offended and
unhappy when they left
us in droves.
Reading this little
book by consultant Bay
Jordan brought back
memories of those happy
times. It’s not often I
find myself in heated | |
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| | snooker player who
completes a 147 break
you begin to grasp how
far we are from
achieving that by
tinkering with reward
packages.
Jordan makes the
(seemingly) obvious
point that people who
are enjoying themselves
will be better workers
as a result yet, in my
experience, companies
treat people who enjoy
their work with the
utmost suspicion. He
also counsels against
confusing enjoyment of
the work itself with the
idea of creating a “fun
place to work” which can
often merely
distracting. In fact,
he’s not that keen on
top-down initiatives – a
great example in the
book concerns two audit
clerks checking
inventory in a chilly
factory who decided to
turn the job into a
race. Because a bet was
involved, they also
checked each other’s
work with the result
that the work was
carried out quickly and
to a high level of
quality.
Creating these sorts
of positive feedback
loops is not easy and
Jordan includes an
illuminating chapter
(with plenty of 4x4s,
matrix fans) looking at
how, on the contrary,
lack of investment in
the personal development
of employees can create
“doom loops” in which
performance rapidly
degrades. While it’s
possible to briefly
energise employees with
external threats and
prizes, unless the
employees themselves are | |
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| | allowed to develop, this
energy quickly
dissipates. Of course,
as Jordan accepts,
simply having a bunch of
enthusiastic,
self-motivating
employees can also be a
disaster unless they are
aligned with the
organisation’s own
goals. In setting up
this part of the thesis
he takes a swipe at that
cherished notion, the
“work-life” balance,
which posits work and
life at the opposite
ends of the scale. As
Jordan points out, the
opposite of life is
death, and this
dichotomy forces us to
see time spent at work
as a kind of living
death, time robbed from
our families and our
pleasures. Taking a cue
from Stephen Covey,
Jordan would rather
position the employment
as something that not
only allows us to be
ourselves, but helps us
to fulfil all the other
areas of our lives more
effectively.
Personal development
is obviously going to be
the key to this, and
Jordan argues that we
need to rethink the
basic contract between
management and
workforce. If people
are our greatest assets,
what does that mean?
It’s clearly, as Jordan
points out, accounting
nonsense, as people
don’t behave like
ordinary assets at all.
What about training?
Should that be added to
the company’s asset
value, rather than be
seen as a cost? And what
would that imply for the
“ownership” of that | |
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| | created asset,
part-human being,
part-company
investment?
These are deep
questions which strike
at the root of the
“master-servant”
paradigm which underpins
current labour
relations, and also the
prevailing view of
labour as a cost to be
minimised. In a
penetrating chapter on
performance-related
initiatives, Jordan
dissects the various
incentive schemes on
offer and shows how,
rather than aligning all
levels of the
organisation to the same
objectives, they can
often be deeply
divisive. One of the
ironies that emerges
from his analysis is
that it is often the
workers who are the most
concerned with the
long-term prospects of
the company, and not the
supposed custodians of
shareholder value, the
board.
Jordan’s solution to
this is essentially to
try and reconcile the
age-old divide between
labour and capital by
recognising that labour
is no more a cost than
capital, and that both,
in a sense, deserve a
dividend. It’s a
radical conclusion to
such a small book, but
Jordan manages to cover
a lot of ground in his
allotted space.
Thoroughly recommended.
Lean companies need
FAT people by Bay
Jordan is published by
Wyvern Books, ISDN
0975844745.
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| | agreement with a book
but, after many a
scribbled “yes!” or
underlining, I felt this
self-published tome –
which has been out for a
while – deserved a
review and to be brought
to a wider audience.
Jordan’s thesis is
that in these days of
“lean” organisations we
actually need to demand
more, get more and offer
more to our people, – to
make them “FAT”: “fully
aligned teamworkers” or
(less successfully)
”fulfilled, aware and
tendentious”. OK it’s
not the greatest
acronym, but as we all
know to our cost, great
acronyms aren’t always
the herald of great
ideas.
Jordan believes we
need to move beyond the
simplistic
stick-and-carrot notions
that have guided
management thinking up
to now, discarding or
amending a few cherished
shibboleths such as
Maslow’s hierarchy of
needs (and, hopefully,
words like
“incentivised” ) along
the way. What Jordan is
after are the roots of
the internal stimuli
that creates what he
calls “devotion” which
in turn comes from a
genuine joy in the task
itself. If you think of
the satisfaction that a
wine-grower gets when he
sniffs the bouquet of a
perfect vintage, or the | |
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