"If a company were as ill-informed about its capital performance as most companies are about their employee performance, it would be in serious trouble with the investor community." Shareholder Value May/June 2002
Or maybe not!
I just came across this headline earlier today and could not help being struck by the irony. I guess the collapse of the financial services industry reveals that these companies, at least, were pretty ill-informed about their capital performance.
Yet somehow the trouble they have reaped does not seem to be quite as serious as this headline seemed to imply it would be. Governments all over the world are rushing in blindly to pour in trillions of dollars to "bail them out" and, while questions are unquestionably being asked, the general consensus seems to be to fix the problem first. In comparison the investor community's response actually has been remarkably muted. It appears to be more concerned about the possible nationalisation of its interests than holding the company officers to account.
Capital performance that badly monitored, just begs the question, "How bad, then, is the monitoring of people performance?" What is particularly worrying is the fact that the financial services industry is a people dominated industry. In other words, it is one where the monitoring of people effectiveness is, or should be, at least as important as capital performance monitoring. With more than half a million people having lost their jobs in the past month in the US alone, it would at least be reassuring to know that management got this right.
So then, new measures are urgently needed to police management effectiveness at both overseeing capital and people performance. The employee engagement solution Zealise offers certainly provides a good starting point for the latter. Engaged employees are people who act as if they own the business. They care, and because they do, they actually provide a brake on short-term management thinking and inappropriate management behaviour. And, of course, that is the standard of employee engagement that we provide.