Allied with the lack of proficiency surveyed executives say they have in acquiring and then using data specific to their most skilled employees—the "A" workers—and key to the inability these respondents have noted with loosening the rigid structure of the companies in which they work is the tendency to think in terms of jobs or tasks rather than skills and competencies. For example, when asked why they can't optimize their "A" players, the issue that immediately drew consensus among telephone survey respondents—regardless of continent and regardless of departmental affliation—was that the "workforce is structured around tasks/jobs rather than skills/competencies." Similarly, in their quest for agility in their organizations, more than half of the executives questioned by telephone said they believe that having an "on-demand" workforce can have a major impact on how well the company can deliver its unique business strategy. | |
The problem, however, is that most corporations have built their workforce constructs around the job. If the "job" is viewed as a rigid brick, with a defined set of responsibilities, tasks, spending authority, ownership/reporting, compensation and growth, the structure appears easy to manage, control and compensate. On the other hand, it is not very agile. The impact of this rigidity is easy to see in the staffng process—where a company hires through the zenith of its business cycle and lays of through the nadir. Imagine the difference if they could instead simply redeploy the resources they have throughout the company on an as-needed basis. This rigidity is also on display as projects are staffed—and respondents were quick to point out that rigidity. In fact, 83% of executives said that when it came to reallocating people to projects across teams or lines of business, their companies demonstrated average or higher levels of rigidity and only 16% said their companies were flexible (see Exhibit). In the typical organization, such as those represented by the surveyed executives, roles are staffed solely from within a single unit, rather than spanning multiple business units. The communication, information and compensation infrastructure is simply unable to support these types of teams. Clearly this limits both project scope and performance. The above findings have been extracted from the Workforce Agility research commissioned by Convergys. About Convergys: |
Published: Monday, December 13, 2004
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