Remodelling of employee-employer relationship

This article describes my understanding of the current state and the desired direction of evolution of the employee-employer relation (EER). I was triggered to share my view by the McKinsey’s Organization insights presented in the “Great Attrition or Great Attraction? The choice is yours.” article published here.

I fully agree with the bottom line presented, "Employees crave investment in the human aspects of work (whereas employers were more likely to focus on transactional ones like compensation).".  This is our current reality on the global scale, there is no doubt about it.

Still I feel I need to share my view both on the presented means of attraction as well as on the wider topic of the employee-employer relation itself. I believe the attrition issue needs to be solved on a deeper, more systemic level. On the level of the nature of the employee-employer relation itself.

The research confirms the gap between the employees' expectations and what employers offer. The opportunity for remote work on the big scale is a relatively new phenomenon and clearly a significant contributor to "The Great Attrition". Employees have gained a new dimension, a new degree of freedom that they can shape for their convenience. 

However the overall landscape has not changed, it has existed for decades. The landscape is defined by, as the report says, the transactional nature of the employee-employer relation. As a consequence of the transactional nature of this relation we observe deep and common disconnectedness of employees from their employers and employers' goals.

It is the very nature of the relationship that we need to challenge in order to eliminate the gap. Imagine the world of work if we can find a more balanced relation, a relation that matches the needs of the both parties closer. Imagine the world of work if we can align the goals of both employees and employers!

Any other means, including those suggested in the article, are not sufficient to solve the original issue. Their impact is limited, and these may only serve as temporary fixes to something that needs a proper remodelling or even a replacement.

Here is what I mean by that. The transactional nature of the employee-employer relation creates a gap. Clearly the gap originates from the difference in goals of the two parties. On one hand employees care for and expect adding the human aspects of work into the equation, on the other hand employers offer a transaction. A transaction that can be decorated by additional elements, which may obscure the underlying nature, but still is a transaction. The transactional nature will not change if we sprinkle the relation with additional elements. 

Employees invest their most precious irreversible resource - their personal time and, so no surprise, they expect this sacrifice to be valued and appreciated by the accepting party of employers. Yet, employers are not in the frame of appreciating this kind of gift, employers are not equipped, not in the position to satisfy this expectation of employees. Employers are rather positioned in the frame of exploiting this gift to generate profit for the investors, the magical Return of Invested Capital (ROIC), the holy grail of nowadays business. Such a framing of employers defines companies' attitude to the relation and, as a result, defines the nature of the relation with employees. As long as employers are trapped in the frame of ROIC the relation will remain transactional and the gap will exist.

The level of the roots of the nature of the relationship is the appropriate level on which we can tackle the gap. If we want to eliminate the gap, and I believe this is what we all want in the long term, we need to talk about remodelling or even replacing the transactional nature of the relationship. We need to help employers relieve themselves from the frame of the ROIC, the root cause of the transactional nature of the relationship. Only then employers will be in a position to come up with an approach fitting the needs of employees. 

We may not yet know how to do this in practice, but this is clearly the direction to pursue. After all, employees are us, we are societies and it is societies that define the employee-employer relation. It may be hard to imagine, because the currently existing relation has been with us for really long and we got used to treating it as an unchangeable element of the landscape. 

I believe we are well equipped for such a change. We have proven for ages that we are capable of reacting to challenges of life and we can update our value systems and worldviews to adapt.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Simple truths, episode N: Process is dead

Process is dead. When it comes to process everything has been said. Starting from theory of constraints, through Value Mapping, kanban, complexity theories, lead time & cycle time optimisations, dependency management, to the magic of incremental approach based on short iterations, incremental approach to delivery and product creation, goal and result oriented approaches, scaling, continuous improvement and operational excellence. 

In case of IT projects this knowledge shortened the software delivery live cycle from 3 years in 1980s to 1sec 2010s. 

Nowadays there exist multiple ready to use process governance frameworks that present enormous value and quality: Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, Nexus, Less, to name a few. They really do a great job.

What is more: everything can be done when it comes to process. Nobody has reached the process optimization end though. Not because it is impossible to optimize further - the options here are endless. Nobody has reached the process optimization end because on the way down this route companies discover issues on their way to their effectiveness that with time destroy the energy of the process improvement effort. Due to the attribution error, the issues are attributed to the process / framework itself and the framework gets blamed and accused that "it does not work for us". 

Yet the true reasons of not reaching expected effectiveness improvements lay somewhere else. The expected effectiveness boost is not reached because process is only one of a few elements of an effective company. It is usually the one that is explored as first. And it is usually the last one... Most companies begins and ends within the process optimization aspect. And if they try again, they try in the wrong way - they try to apply another process governance framework...

Given the above vicious cycle it comes as no surprise that the process area is the area of the biggest buzz and the best money for consultants, majority of which never needed to look and explore beyond the process frameworks. These guys will not make your organization effective in the long term. They are capable of setting up a delivery machine, but that is it. Where is human in this machine? This question remains unasked and unanswered.

Few companies and few leaders think wider. I guess you do if you are reading this. 

Process is the easiest piece of the organizational effectiveness puzzle for us humans. It is logical and tangible - natural food for our neocortex brain.

What needs to follow in parallel to implementing an effective process are the areas of 

• organizational culture - how we get things done here, 
• organizational design and architecture - how an organization supports flow of value, and
• leadership style - what mindset and behaviours leaders promote. 

These areas add ocean-deep and ocean-wide potential into the big picture. One can cross the barriers of the machine metaphor as the work in these areas is with people and for people. 

All four dimensions are complementary and all are equally important. They are also closely related - one cannot grow and reach higher levels of maturity without others growing in parallel. It was Michael Spayd who I learnt from the special name for this phenomenon - the idea of all four dimensions tetra-arising.

p.s. Thanks Maciej Rusinek for triggering me to articulate my thoughts!

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash