I want to improve the performance of my organisation and have been advised to consider benchmarking. Could you outline what this covers?
Benchmarking can be external or internal. External benchmarking involves comparing your organisation, or parts of it with one or more others and may involve visits or desk search to identify useful comparable data. The other organisations don’t necessarily need to be operating in the same field as you.
Your choice of organisation to benchmark against depends very much on what you want to learn. The other organisation may be doing totally different work to you but could have developed management techniques that are very effective and transferable.
The actual benchmarking can also be quite variable. You could, for example, identify your organisation’s critical success factors and measure them against those in another operation. Once you identify an area where they are stronger, find out what they are doing that has produced this better performance. Next, assess whether this would be applicable to your organisation and what the results might be.
Or you could take simpler approach and just meet with key managers from one or more of the benchmarked organisations, asking them general questions about their operation and what has been successful over the past year or so. It can be equally valuable to look at what has not worked for them as you might be doing this or contemplating doing it yourself. This very simple approach to benchmarking is often the most effective.
You can also approach benchmarking from an internal perspective. If you have number of divisions or regions, for example, you can benchmark key measures between them. Handled well, this creates an environment of healthy competition and learning. By deliberately spreading the word about areas of high performance across the organisation, everyone can learn from the experience of others. This approach can enable an organisation to grow and develop more quickly than its competitors.
Also consider working with professional benchmarking consultancy. These can offer number of useful services, at price. Some, for example, specialise in specific professional sectors – such as comparing human resource practices in different organisations. Others focus on particular industries. Some consultancies also run conferences that enable people with similar benchmarking interests to share experiences. They will often organise industrywide benchmarking partnerships so that an organisation doesn’t need to establish its own benchmarking relationships. Instead it can just join the club and gain access to information from all participating organisations.
I have been advised that we need to implement culture survey. It sounds bit wishy washy to me and I can’t see the value to my business. Am I on the wrong track?
People often see culture surveys as way of measuring employee satisfaction – the idea being that happy employees will stay with the company for while and make positive contribution. This is logical conclusion but, as you say, can deliver wishy-washy results if approached in this way as it fails to get to the real issue.
In today’s world, the only way we can truly compete is to come up with new and innovative ideas. To do that we need to engage people in the organisation and gain their fullest commitment. The term “engagement” means that when someone goes to work they can choose to use as much of their brain as possible or just little. If they are really engaged they are choosing to contribute as much as possible.
There are number of levels of engagement or commitment that people go through at work. First of all they need to know what is expected of them and what their job is. At the same time they need to feel they are paid fairly for what they are doing and that they have the tools necessary to carry out the job. Assuming this first level is achieved, the person will come to work. This is very low level of engagement but an essential first step.
Next, the person looks for recognition and sense that what they do is valued. If this doesn’t happen, they don’t feel that it is worthwhile putting in any extra effort. Those who reach this second level of engagement, will then look at the other people they are working with and also the organisation itself. They will ask themselves whether these are the people they want to work with in the long term and whether the organisation’s goals and direction match where they want to go themselves. If there is mismatch the person will often start to look for role elsewhere and again will withhold their commitment.
Those who reach this third level of engagement will start to look for growth and development. At this fourth and final level their commitment and engagement continues to grow. If not it will lessen and again they will tend to look for another role.
An even worse outcome is if potentially valuable performer stays with the organisation, performs at minimum level, and reduces the overall performance of their team or group. culture survey can very effectively measure these different levels of engagement within an organisation.
This can be done at an individual level and used in performance management processes. It can also be used at unit, divisional or even corporate level to measure the overall level of engagement in an organisation.
Kevin Gaunt, FNZIM, FAIM, is CEO of NZIM Auckland and has been senior executive with, and consultant to, some of New Zealand’s largest companies.
