PERSPECTIVE ON BUSINESS : People Are the Fuel of the Future : Understanding and empowering workers will translate to a healthy bottom line and a renewed economy.
At last! At Monday’s Conference on the Future of the American Workplace in Chicago, President Clinton, Secretaries Robert Reich of Labor and Ron Brown of Commerce and major business and labor leaders finally agreed on the solution to our economic malaise: our people. Developing and mobilizing the full productive potential of companies’ human assets--their competence, creativity, knowledge and energy--is the most powerful engine we have for economic growth.
I have spent my career studying the link between people and productivity, for the last several years as the leader of a nonprofit organization called Healthy Companies. Funded primarily by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, we have brought together thinkers and leaders from industry, government, labor and academia. Over the last 10 years, we’ve been working with healthy, high-performing companies and have developed a comprehensive system for investing in, managing and developing a company’s skilled, dedicated workforce.
One of the first lessons we learned is that building high-performing workplaces is not easy. It requires profound changes, patience and tenacity. But as participants at the conference recognized, we have crossed an economic and historical Rubicon. We cannot go back. To survive in the 21st Century, we must develop the health and productivity of our workforce. Our work at Healthy Companies suggests that the following four steps would make an excellent start.
* Create a new vision for our workplaces. At the core of this vision must be shared values that link healthy, skilled, and ethical adults to their healthy, competitive and socially responsible companies. When a company invests in its employees, they provide value to the customers, who in turn fuel the earnings of stockholders, who complete the cycle by providing capital for the company to reinvest in its people.
A major piece of our work has been to define the dimensions of organizational health, including open communication, wide participation, continuous learning, people-centered technology, valuing diversity and institutional fairness. These dimensions represent arenas in which sweat, commitment and investment will be required by workers and management alike.
But they are not isolated, piecemeal components. We cannot develop the full potential of our people by focusing only on narrow, limited aspects of their work, like quality or diversity or technology. When all the dimensions are in play, bolstering and balancing one another like a living matrix, then an organization is rewarding, productive, energetic and profitable.
* Make our company cultures empowering. How an organization distributes responsibility and accountability, how it shares (or doesn’t share) power and information, how its people interact--this is a company’s culture. And it is not neutral. The rules, attitudes, systems and incentives of an organization either enhance productivity or hinder it.
If people do not feel free to voice their true opinions, concerns and criticisms, they will bottle up their creativity. If employees are told how to perform a task rather than being given the problem and asked to devise their own solution, their hearts won’t be in their work. This is basic human psychology. It is common sense.
* Devise people-centered measurements. What we measure is what we treasure. Today’s most important assets are intellectual and social capital--the “soft” side of business--but we don’t have an accounting system that measures and values them. If we want our leaders to focus on tapping our human potential, then we have to invent ways to measure how well they’re doing and reward them accordingly.
For example, why shouldn’t employees give their bosses a yearly review, and why shouldn’t part of every manager’s bonus be based on that review? Why aren’t employee-attitude surveys a regular part of annual reports?
We need a new conceptual framework for thinking about human assets. We especially need common ways to measure them, so that we can see just how investing in human capital adds value to the customer and increases the return to the shareholder.
* Wanted: healthy leaders. Idealists and cynics need not apply. Pragmatists required. To maximize the amount of heart employees put into their work, leaders will need a deeper understanding of themselves and the people around them. It means they will have to empower their employees, not make them cower. They will need to be comfortable both giving and receiving criticism. They will need to possess a more mature understanding of status and ego.
These skills and strengths will enable us to mobilize our main competitive advantage, our people. The secrets to our success are inside--inside ourselves and inside our companies. All we need to do is look.
