Staffing
The importance of strategy
Give employees and clients a voice in your company strategy.
By Marcia Passos Duffy
Smart Business Houston | May 2008
Brenda Harris
President and COO
Talent Tree
Business strategies are often created
to solve a problem or to save time
or money. But company strategies are often created by CEOs or business
owners in a vacuum, with little input
from the employees that the strategy will
ultimately impact.
“If management doesn’t bring in people
who are close to the problem, the strategy often doesn’t work,” says Brenda
Harris, President and Chief Operating
Officer of Talent Tree, a staffing company
based in Houston. “You need buy-in from
the people who are close to the problem
if a business strategy is going to stick.”
Smart Business spoke with Harris
about the benefits of bringing employees
to the table to create business strategies
that are consistent and solve problems.
Could you give an example of a typical business strategy that is directed from the top
down, without input from employees?
Most of the business strategies that are
issued from the top down are ones that
save money or time, but the CEO or business owner who creates these new business strategies often fails to see how it
will affect people on a day-to-day basis. It
could be a simple change, such as giving
out paychecks at a slightly later time on
Friday, to convenience management to
wholesale changes in company policy,
such as reworking vacation or sick-time
policies.
Why is it important to get input from
employees?
Because oftentimes, changes in policy
directly affect how employees do their
jobs. Changes in policy issued from the
top down, without any say by the workers themselves, can decrease productivity, create resentment and even negatively effect retention. And, CEOs also need
to realize that they don’t have all the
good ideas. Of course, there are some
business decisions that can’t be put out
there and are at the discretion of the
CEO or business owner, but decisions
that affect the way people do their jobs — or feel about their jobs — do need to
be bounced off of employees in various
departments.
How can a CEO or business owner get
employee input?
The best strategy is to create a task
force of key employees to look at the
new business strategy. Create a time
frame to allow the task force to find facts
and come up with a recommendation or
revisions to the strategy. This must be a
very open process where dissenting
opinions are heard and acknowledged.
The task force can also make recommendations as to how the business strategy
can best be implemented. This improves
credibility with your workers and is an
opportunity for employees to gain recognition once their ideas are implemented.
Could you give an example of how this
might work?
We wanted to change from issuing paychecks to giving employees a pay card,
which would be deposited with the appropriate funds every week. We wanted to do this for a number of reasons,
including convenience and cost/time savings of printing and distributing checks.
We also thought it would be a better
alternative for our temporary employee
staff who had to come into the office
every week to get their checks. For us, in
management, it made sense all around.
However, the idea was met with resistance among employees, perhaps because
it was new and unknown. We decided to
set up a task force consisting of employees who were for the idea as well as
those who were against it. The task
force’s job was to learn about the pay
card system, explain it to employees, get
their feedback and report back to management with the pros and cons of the
new payment system. By the way, even
the people who were dead set against it
ended up seeing the positive aspects of
the system, and it was adopted in our
company.
What if the task force decides not to implement a business strategy?
Management, of course, does have the
final say. But the task force has a chance
to make a persuasive argument about the
reasons why a business strategy would
be a bad move for the company. In many
cases, the task force is seeing things that
management cannot.
However, there may be times that the
CEO or business owner sees the bigger
picture that the task force does not. For
example, task force members might find
that they do not want to make certain
cost-cutting changes in their departments. But the CEO or business owner
knows that those dollars add up to significant savings across the entire company at the end of the year. That is the
advantage of having both the employees’
point of view as well as the CEO’s.
BRENDA HARRIS is President and Chief Operating Officer of Talent Tree, www.talenttree.com, a staffing company based in Houston.
Reach her at (713) 789-1818 or Brenda.harris@talenttree.com.
