The quality movement began in the United States in the early 1980’s. Led by W. Edwards Deming, Phil Crosby, Joe Juran, and others, companies throughout the country began to understand concepts around process improvement and reduction in variation as the way to simultaneously improve quality and reduce costs. Prior to the quality movement, convention thinking was that there was a tradeoff between quality and cost.

Motorola introduced the concept of Six Sigma in the mid-1980’s as an outgrowth of the early quality movement. It was followed by lean manufacturing and other concepts all focused on the process of producing products and providing services. Astute organizations not involved with manufacturing applied the concepts to service and administrative processes with great success. Companies that faithfully applied the principles of quality management saw enormous financial gains and improvement in customer satisfaction. Those companies that were first to act on this new way of thinking created a competitive advantage.

The challenge now facing many organizations is what do they do now that they have optimized their processes and improved their quality. While there is always opportunity for continuous improvement, there is diminishing returns from concerted effort on process improvement. The early competitive advantage created by being a leader in the quality movement has disappeared as competitors caught up.

Many experts believe the next true breakthrough in organizational financial performance will not come from technology or process improvement, but rather in the human side of the equation. Gallup has coined the term HumanSigma to mean reduction in the variability in key employee and customer outcomes.

Thegoal is to reduce the number of disengaged employees and customers.

A recent poll by The Conference Board found that only 45 percent of Americans are satisfied with their job. The is the lowest level ever recorded in the 22 years that they have been doing the survey. Similarly, a recent Gallup poll found that only 23 percent of workers fully engaged – meaning that they are passionate about what they do and willing to do what it takes to move the company forward. The remaining were either not engaged-just going through the motions and doing enough to get by, or actively disengaged-undermining the company and negatively influencing those employees who were engaged.

When you look at these statistics, it is apparent that there is a huge productivity and financial improvement possible by focusing on employee engagement. Imagine if every employee performed the same way as your best employee. Going back to the concept of HumanSigma, the less variation that there is between your top performers and lowest performer, the more profitable that you will be. Extensive research by Gallup estimates that U.S. businesses lose over $300 billion per year because of worker disengagement. Their research shows a strong and direct correlation between key business indicators such as profitability, productivity, safety, absenteeism, and customer satisfaction and employee engagement.

Just like the quality movement in the early 1980’s, some business leaders will dismiss this as not relevant to them. Those who place a focus on this can create competitive advantage.

To paraphrase a key statement that appears in my book, Turning Potential Into Action, worker engagement is not a worker issue but rather it is a leadership issue. The first step in creating a workforce that is highly engaged is to put leaders in place who have the skills and capability to engage workers. This requires a paradigm shift for many organizations in their selection process for people in leadership roles. Typical selection for leadership roles tends to focus more on technical skills and performance rather than on leadership skills. In a manufacturing plant the best worker doesn’t necessarily make the best supervisor, in a hospital the best nurse doesn’t make the best nurse manager, and in the school system the best teacher doesn’t make the best principal. The skill set to be an effective leader is significantly different than that required to be an individual contributor.

Just as it is important to put the right people in leadership roles, companies can also benefit greatly by putting the right people in the right jobs I recently had a discussion with our minister about his No prescription cialis desire to move our youth director into another position at the church. The youth director has done a good job and really enjoys youth work. She is passionate about it. His rationale for considering the move is that she just completed course work to become certified in another aspect of church work and would benefit from getting experience there. I convinced him that making the move would create two problems-he would have a disengaged person in one job and would not have someone as passionate in the youth director job.

Too often in the corporate world we put people into jobs that don’t suit them-either from a skill standpoint or from an interest standpoint. The result is immediate disengagement.

I did some work with a company that was not satisfied with the performance of their sales force. Using some of the assessment tools that I have to determine interests and preferred work style, we realigned sales responsibilities with dramatic improvement in sales performance. For example, a person with the least patience was working on government accounts and a person who was deliberate and slow paced was working on corporate accounts. We switched account responsibilities and saw an immediate impact on sales.

In addition to putting the right people in leadership roles and putting people in jobs that match their skills and interests, there are other steps organizations can take to increase worker engagement. If you haven’t read my book, it is a good place to start to get ideas for your organization.

Author Bio: Ryan Scholz works with leaders whose success is dependent on getting commitment and high performance from others. patent propecia He is author of Turning Potential into Action: Eight Principles for Creating a Highly Engaged Work Place. For more information, visit his web site at Cialis Professional www.lead-strat-assoc.com.

Category: Business Management
Keywords: Workplace, Optimization, Human, Resources, Performance, Variation