Pollster: Performance has little to do with pay, bureaucracy Good engagement and more autonomy for staff, and a willingness to accept "controlled risk" are the characteristics that make for a successful organisation, according to the head of a major polling company. Ben Page, chief executive of Ipsos MORI, told the the Guardian's IT Leadership in the Public Sector Forum that its …
Performance related to pay ! hahahahahahahahaha. Had $K stolen because PHBs had to have a bell curve, despite claiming a much better than average staff quality, ie an asymmetric distribution. Bonuses for team members those who did the work never heard of. CEOs who cost billions and get massive payouts.
Bureaucracy ? When expensive IT staff spend more time doing relatively cheap clerical work instead of fixing the problem so some process droids can claim they are productive. Management who think that spews of verbose, cliched, ungrammatical jargon, coupled with lies and great distance from coalface is leadership.
Yep, treating staff as humans, allowing significant trust of experienced technical staff and being focused on doing the tasks for which the organisation exists is now a novel idea.
The first thing to recognise is that in IT, no two staff members are the same. No two staff members do the same job (even if they have the same job description, pay and conditions and boss) and no two staff members want the same thing from their employers.
So putting together a soundbite or two of what makes a successful organisation is absolutely no help to anyone - even if all organisations measured their success the same way.
You also have to recognise that a large proportion of your staff (maybe even most of them) are in the wrong job, at the wrong company. They got to their current position through a series of accidents and either can't, are too scared to try and change anything or simply have no real idea what sort of job they WOULD like - or be good at doing.
If you're lucky you might just stumble across some attributes of some employees that you can manipulate to control their behaviour. However there is no "one size fits all" approach - or at least not one that works. Some people like money and are prepared to work harder to get more of it. Some just want an easy life: counting down the days until they retire. While others want to earn enough to keep themselves going while having enough free time to make it all worthwhile. Apart from those types there are many, many more that defy description (apart from the bullies and competitive jerks who's rewards require them to sabotage the other workers) or who might even have changing priorities and desires as circumstances change.
However, the things that are most likely to help people do a good job are a clear understanding of what is expected from them, the feeling that there's a reason for doing the things they're told to and at least the illusion of competence from their boss. While those are still ill-defined and unmeasurable (and probably over-generalised platitudes, too) at least they sound like the real thing, and if you can fake that, at least there's some hope for you.
"Page said that in top performing organisations, only about 5 per cent of staff have no idea what it is trying to achieve, but in the public sector the average is close to 30 per cent."
Comparing "top performers" with "average performers in sector X" is GUARANTEED to make sector X sound bad, isn't it?
How do top public sector organizations score? How do average non-public ones score?
Do public sector organizations have necessarily less clear objectives? Compare, for example, the wide range of services (and the messy human nature of the target) that your typical local council has to achieve compared with an organization trying to sell more widgets, or higher-margin widgets.
Compare a Top Performing Company's aims with that of a Average Public Sector's aims.
TPC Aims = Sell more widgets, make more profit
APS Aims = educated children, less deprivation, cleaner streets, prettier buildings, healthier pensioners, nicer parks, fewer traffic jams, fewer anti-social neighbours, what else you got?
Public sector aims, and the means by which they can be measured, are far more complex. So it is hardly surprising that they're not as easily understood.
and the old addage of 'if you took public sector employees and placed them in private sector employment, they wouldn't know what had hit them' rings true.
I was recruited in a massive drive for around 16,000 staff around 2 years ago now. I was utterly shocked by the quality of their current, long serving permanent staff who were better paid and underperformed massively compared to the new starters- whilst I was in my paticular office, the new starters would consistently outperform the old guard, yet when it came up to contract renewals, we got chucked out on our arses. In the period we were employed there, customer service and other KPIs were massively improved.
Nothing was ever done about inequalities in performance, and the new starters took the brunt of the work.
What the public sector needs to do is get rid of the staff that have been there for decades and bring in enthusiastic, hard working staff to get the best value from the taxpayers pound.
"What I find most compelling is that, when you look at who is performing best and worst, there is no correlation whatsoever with how people feel about their pay,"
Is that so? Take the top performer and don't give them a bonus or payrise when everyone else gets one and see how their performance goes.
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