A landscape strewn with fallen idols


A landscape strewn with fallen idols

The corporate scandals of the last few years have not helped the reputation of private enterprise at all. While one can have a rather ˜I told you so,' attitude about some of the aggressive start-ups like Enron, the shaming of much more venerable, household names has been more difficult to accept. But what they do illustrate is that our highly complex, global businesses are almost impossible to manage perfectly every day, 365 days a year. Hardly a day goes by without a media report of yet another organisation whose accounts in one region or another don't add up, or have been over or under reported . Whether this is brought about by pressures to perform and be profitable I don't know. What it does do is create an increasingly poor reputation for companies in general and some corporations in particular.

Reputations take decades to build and can be destroyed practically overnight. Does this mean that all the employees are bad? Of course it doesn't. But it does mean that prospective employees are asking a lot more questions at interviews than they did. And your current employees are demanding a lot more disclosure from top management as to the real state of the organisation. If we are unable to give straight answers to direct questions we are certainly not going to be in a position to recruit and retain the right kind of people for our businesses.

Headhunters tell me that it takes a whole lot more these days to get candidates to change jobs. They really want to know what is going on in a prospective new company and a failure to tell them means they just won't sign.

Returning to my key theme once again: smart people usually tend to be responsible people. They demand to know what the organisation they work for is doing in their name . Similarly with investors, customers and suppliers. If those employees are bringing themselves to work every day, they are bringing to your office or factory their concerns about everything from the environment to accounting standards and stock price manipulation. That life/work balance concept begins outside your firm, not inside. And so, for example, we need to appreciate that our employees are first off ecologists, concerned waste-recyclers, members of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the World Wildlife Fund. Their career choices are - one way or another - governed by these lifestyle beliefs. So, increasingly, they want to know if your organisation pollutes, from where does it source its raw materials, to which governments do you sell and so on. And if you cannot answer they don't want to join you.

So the ability to communicate what your organisation stands for and what its ethics are is vital to building that long- term respect and commitment. As I said earlier, honest, open communication is going to win the day every time.

So where does HR fit into all of this? Is HR ready and able to play its part in our aim of capitalising on people who want to be themselves at work and want their life/work balance to be in harmony? And if not, what will HR need to do, and need to be, to make it work. Chapter 7 hopefully holds the secret.




The New Rules of Engagement(c) Life-Work Balance and Employee Commitment
Performance Tuning for Linux(R) Servers
ISBN: N/A
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 131

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