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Newsletter: November 2010

Wishing You a Safe and Enjoyable Holiday Season

Management Problems: Is Your Management Causing Employee Issues and Slow Business Growth?

Is your management team creating unnecessary employee issues that are leading to:

  • Low employee engagement
  • Low employee morale
  • Poor productivity
  • Poor customer service
  • The need for voluminous policy and procedure manuals to ensure that the manager follows the rules, and
  • High turnover

To help you understand if this is the case in your organization/company, consider these questions, which may take you out of your comfort zone...

7 questions to help you determine if your management is causing the above common concerns:

  1. Does every member of your management team know the company's Mission/Purpose and Vision.
  2. Can every member of your management team describe the company Values, (that is, the key ways in which you go about your work, such as excellence in customer service, innovation, teamwork, respect...)? And, can every member of the management team give some examples of how the company values are demonstrated on a day-to-day basis?
  3. Does your management have the skills, resources and knowledge to take your organization to its ideal future state?
  4. Do you have a succession plan – that is, an approach for and/or development of high potential/successor candidates?
  5. Do new people promoted to or hired for a management position clearly demonstrate the company values?
  6. Do you have an effective way to transition new managers into their positions (or do you just assume the transition will happen)?
  7. And, do you remove poor and ineffective managers quickly?

If you said "NO" to any of the questions above then you likely have employee issues as a result of your management problems.

When Addressing Employee Issues, Ensure You Have Sound Management First

How can you improve your business when you have employee issues and conflicts getting in your way of running an effective, productive and efficient organization? First, change your approach and take a macro view. That means, you must understand that employee issues are often symptoms of inconsistent or failing management.

Your strongest assets and your key resources are your employees. (Yes, even stronger than your brand. Brand creates awareness and a promise. But it's the employees that deliver on that promise.) And, while painful to acknowledge, it is the most talented employees that leave first.

If you want to improve your business, you must start with your managers. These are the people who are the direct link to your front line employees. These managers include:

  • Department managers
  • Assistant managers
  • Shift supervisors
  • Store managers
  • Team leaders

Yet unfortunately, the role and impact of the direct supervisors are often overlooked when senior management or business owners contemplate improvement questions such as:

  • How can we improve morale?
  • What's a good compensation system?
  • How can we recruit and retain better employees?
  • How do we improve our customer service?

Simply stated, as long as you do not deal with supervisor/manager competency and impact, you cannot effectively deal with any of the questions raised above. It's like trying to come up with a model to explain how our solar system works using the earth as the center of the system. It just won't work, no matter how hard you try. Replace the earth with the sun and it works beautifully. Money spent to improve the effects of management is wasted unless it's spent on addressing poor management first.

Five Required Steps to Identifying and Addressing the Issue of Poor Management

  1. First, get senior executives to function as an aligned team and to translate the mission, vision and values to the managers so as to promote (by demonstration, not lip service) the way business will be done in the company. Remember, employees watch their leadership team for cues on how to behave and how to manage. They look to managers to see what's acceptable and what is not!
  2. Carefully select employees for management positions. This means you need to have a succession plan that incorporates a management development plan for high potential candidates.
  3. Support the transition from employee to manager. Not all newly promoted managers will be ready for their new role. In fact, in many organizations, it's possible that most aren't yet ready for prime time but are needed there. (A good coach or mentor can be very valuable in these situations.)
  4. Define the standard of performance required of all your managers. Provide needed support to help your managers understand your standards and meet them. If they still don't after suitable support and development, replace them. Understand that "what you permit you promote". Tolerating poor managers and poor manager behavior is the same as condoning it. And that is the way employees will perceive it.
  5. Make your management team responsible for performance management and for instilling employee accountability.

Service excellence, cost-effective performance and innovation, start with engaged employees. And employees leave their organizations most often because of a bad boss and a poor-working relationship. If you believe that your employees are not engaged to the extent you want them to be, don't start with employee remediation efforts. Start first, with the leaders and the managers. If employees don't have a good boss and working experience with them, save your money; as nothing else will work, at least for very long. It may be the most difficult place to start, but it will be the most effective for long-term ROI.

Healthcare Corner – News and Issues

Health Reform – Post Mid-Term Election

The political landscape has changed with the outcome of the mid-term election: republicans are now the majority in the House of Representatives. They have promised, and many ran their campaigns on, repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. And while the likelihood of this happening is small (with the democrat controlled Senate and a democratic President who used this as one of his major legislative accomplishments), it is possible that compromises could be made that would change portions of the legislation. This puts into question the upcoming changes that are scheduled to take place starting in January 2012.

Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act January 2011 changes

There is a change going into effect in January 2011 that you should be aware of if you have a Flexible Spending Account (FSA), Health Savings Account (HSA) or a Healthcare Reimbursement Account (HRA). In all of these plans, pre-tax dollars or "tax free" dollars are used to pay for portions of your healthcare expenses. Starting in January 2011, you will no longer be able to buy over-the-counter drugs using funds from one of these accounts (one exception is insulin if purchased without a prescription) without a doctor's prescription.

Healthcare Trends – Consumer Driven Health Plans

The changes taking place in January 2011 as a result of the Affordable Care Act impact individuals with health plans such as flexible savings accounts (FSA), health savings accounts (HSA) and healthcare reimbursement accounts (HRA). While the initial idea behind consumer driven health plans was to give patients control over how they spend their health care dollar and hence become more cost conscious, it can also have an adverse effect: delaying care. If you participate in one of these plans, especially if you are self-employed and purchased a health savings account, think through, carefully, your healthcare decisions. Good health care practices (such as physicals, preventive care, early detection diagnostics) can often be deemed as unnecessary now to save you money today, but also may result in serious, costly and life-threatening events in the future. Managing your health starts with good self-care, but it also includes thoughtful use of the healthcare system.