Perception of Perks in a time of Austerity

As you rise up the corporate ladder, a variety of tangible and intangible benefits come with the increased responsibility. These can range from the aid of an administrative assistant (or several), to a company car, to upgraded travel, to the ability to spend a greater discretionary amount of money on the tools of your job, to better technology (for example, only directors and above get iPads in company X).  Often we refer to these as the "perks" of the job. The generally idea is that the Executive's time and experience is more valuable and, hence, extra spend on the executive to may the most of their time and expertise is well worth it.

However, the perception of Perks in a time of economic austerity can be detrimental to the morale of a company, division, or group. Few outside the executive circle understand the stress of the position (assuming said executive takes the responsibility and accountability of their position seriously). To them, as they are facing budget cuts, reduction in staffing, demands to "do more with less", it only seems that "Management" is wasting company money on Perks for themselves while the "workers" suffer.

If you have been watching the world stage for the last year, this same theme of leaders at the top living in excess while workers suffer austerity has played itself out in revolutions through the Middle East and surrounding areas and, currently as some would claim, the root of the unrest in Great Britain. Now, I am not suggesting that employee riots are around the corner, but at the same time, it is no longer as far fetched as it once might have been. The disparity in some companies, when combined with the general political anger at the economic disparity in the world, can lead to rapid and sustained defection of the talent pool. Top performers may be insulated from internal corporate belt-tightening, but that doesn't mean they are not affected by the poisoned climate of worker unrest and, as top performers, it is easier for them for find a "friendlier" place to work.

Managers and Executives at every level should reflect on and self-audit the perks they receive and take advantage of in their positions. Real gestures of self-regulation by top leadership or even by a single employee's supervisor can make substantial differences in company morale when widely applied across the entire company. The Executive who flies First Class on the company does so typically for a reason - the time on the plane is spent working OR they need to be fresh and alert to make multi-million or multi-billion dollar decisions when they land. Still, most of use at a senior level easily collect enough points on our various personal cards for our own first class upgrades OR could readily pay for our own upgrades out of our annual bonuses. Give the Executive only iPad or Blackberry or whatever to an employee in a business area that really needs the resource and buy your own. A little more self-sufficiency on every leader's part will not save the company the kind of money that causes layoffs, but it will make the majority of the employees in the company feel you are part of their team and that can have a world of impact on the productivity and growth of the company.

Review your perks today for better unity throughout your company.

Enhance Versatility and Lower Costs of Intranet and Internet Web Sites

Last summer, Forrester Research, the highly respected technology trend forecasting organization, published a report (http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/time_to_break_up_with_custom-coded_wcm/q/id/57157/t/2) stating "It's Time To Break Up With Your Custom-Coded WCM [Web Content Management system]". Today's open source web content management systems come in a myraid of flavors for the simpel to the sophisticated. They are low cost, versatile through huge networks of 3rd party extensions, and allow for rapid updating of a web sites appearnce and organization. Even computer novices can author content for these systems. If you are an IT manager or business manager and are still using, supporting, or maintaining a custom solution for your company web site or company intranet, you are at a competative disadvantage. Having provided consulting guidance on the revision of over a dozen coporate and nonprofit web sites in just the last 12 months, PaulDupuis.com can bring renewed value and engagement to your web presence for both external and internal audiences.

Where is the problem? Look in a mirror!

In the May 27th, 2011 issue of CFO Online there was an article entitled "What Makes High Performers Stay?" Based upon research from the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), compensation was found to be one of the least important factors (ranking 35th). Not surprisingly, the most significant high-performer retention driver was Manager Quality, ranking number one in importance. What is surprising is the number of organizations that lack any effective internal review processes to assess bad management choices when employee attrition rises over internal norms. Yes, most Human Resource organizations are structured these days to be able to note and alert on trends where the turn over rate in a particular area rises above company or industry averages. However, both effective internal processes and executive willingness to address such problems remains distinctly absent from a majority of corporate America.

Often Human Resources's procedure, for a spike in employee departures, is to notify the area manager and his or her immediate supervisor. Using two real world examples nearly a decade apart (and hence illustrating that not much has changed), one case was a newly hired VP with high turn over within their area reporting to a Sr. VP/CFO and the other was a newly hired VP reporting to an EVP/COO. In both cases, while dialogs about the high rate of turn over took place between superviser and new hire, neither executive wanted to address the issue decisively, as any obvious failure of the new VPs reflected a failure in their own judgement in the hiring process. In one case, the VP hired was not their first or even their second choice but was a compromise to appease disagreements with one or more of their peers in the organization. To act decisively to replace the newly hired VP would have been a double-whammy - illustrating not only a bad decision in the compromise, but in the hire as well.

In both these cases, the newly hired VP's poor management led to substantial losses in productivity and added costs within their organizations. Large turn over meant lost institutional knowledge, delayed projects, project cost over runs, and and rework to conform to new preference and procedures. Further, there is always a certain change in "brand" preferences with turn over in senior management,  and millions of dollars were spent in switching out various service and technology vendors for alternative brands as some amount of the blame for poor performance was diverted on historical vendor choices. In both cases the newly hired VPs were replaced within 18-24 months. In one case, the career of the EVP/COO was dealt a severe blow by the poor choice and lack of prompt correction. In the case of the Sr. VP/CFO, it remains to be seen how long before repeated errors in hiring judgements offset their skill at their other duties as a CFO.

In both cases, had the executives in charge been willing to recognize the symptoms communicated to them from Human Resources (and more informal sources) and act decisively within typical probationary periods, substantial cost and losses of critical talent could have been avoided. An argument can be made that, in senior management positions at least, a full budget cycle is needed before a Director's or VP's performance can be fairly evaluated, yet the cost to allow that long of a grace period for a poor manager can be massively damaging to the organization. Human Resources should be empowered with access up to and including board level oversight to act on problems of a poor hire at a senior management or executive level promptly. If the executive with the poor hire is unwilling to take prompt action, procedures should be established, formal or informal, to escalate and ensure that failure to act is worth the investment as it amounts to millions!

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatheads

I was prompted by a headline today for the for the "Cloud Leadership Forum 2011", coming to Santa Clara June 20-21, that stated "Is cloud the end of IT as you know it?" This provocative statement (surely intended to be that way) was taken by a well meaning colleague as a factual trend. Once again, there was a belief that the maintenance and investment costs of IT could be magically eliminated by "whatever this Cloud stuff is". Cloud computing, like most technology terms, has come to have many meanings. Wikipedia defines "Cloud Computing" as referring to the provision of computational resources on demand via a network. Cloud computing can be compared to the supply of electricity and gas, or the provision of telephone, television and postal services. All of these services are presented to the users in a simple way that is easy to understand without the users needing to know how the services are provided. This simplified view is called an abstraction. Similarly, cloud computing offers computer application developers and users an abstract view of services that simplifies and ignores much of the details and inner workings. A provider's offering of abstracted Internet services is often called "The Cloud".

The term has come to apply to both distributed application services, often virtualized, on both private networks and public networks (Internet). The term has subsumed SaaS (Software as a Service), Virtualization, Distributed Computing, and a whole lot of other IT buzz-words.  Ultimately IT fads come and go. Companies have spent fortunes outsourcing their entire IT infrastructure to external service providers and then bringing it all back in-house again OR vice versa. The same can be said with off-shoring of labor and many other IT trends. It is always in the vested interest of the marketeers to play to whatever the current trend happens to be to sell technology and services to executives seeking alternatives.

The reality is that IT, to effectively meet the needs of the business it supports, will always need to be a balance between a number of opposing factors. A balance between investment and maintenance. A balance between in-house and outsourced. A balance between accessibility and security. A balance between local and remote resources. A balance between provisioned services (The Cloud) and dedicated services. Savy executives will recognize that this is true, just as there must be balances between Sales and Manufacturing, Operations and R&D, Operating costs and Capital investment, and so on.  Your CIO should be dialoging with you on a regular bases to adjust the balance of these factor over time to maintain alignment with the strategic and tactical objectives of the organization. Radical fork-lift style changes rarely acheive the results and return people imagine they will.