Approximately 10 years ago, I was doing my Norwegian military service in a dusty HQ Defense Command office. It was there that I first stumbled across a business problem that should be familiar to many leaders. Having researched the topic thoroughly since, I haven’t found any suggestions for a solution. I’ve researched academic literature, business literature, and business practice. No mention of a solution. Actually, not even a mention of the problem.
If there isn’t a mention of the problem anywhere, one might think that the problem wasn’t very problematic, right? Wrong. When I came up with a business process algorithm to solve it back in my military days, and when I’ve introduced the same algorithm in other organizations later, it has become an instant “must have” requirement. After I left the military, the chief of my department, Colonel Berit Ovesen, wrote to me that the simple tool I created had become one of their most important working tools, implying considerable savings.
The problem
Let me describe this business problem: If you’re an officer in the Norwegian armed forces, you’re supposed to move around to new positions every couple of years. To accumulate a certain liquidity in this internal employment market, people can only change positions twice a year. (A model that more companies should look into, by the way.) At the end of a term, each officer applied for a prioritized list of positions becoming vacant. And these applications were the headache for HQ that I’m talking about. How do you handle several thousand priorities in a way that is effective and fair to the employees?
More generally, when a business leader is faced with the task of radically restructuring an organization or tightly merging two organizations, the same problem arises: How to allocate a number of people to a number of positions.
This problem is radically different from what existing recruitment systems try to solve. They support the process of fitting the best of a group of people to one specific position. Take a minute to think about it, and you’ll notice that adding a second dimension (not one, but multiple open positions) greatly complicates the puzzle. See if you can answer these questions:
* Is it fair for everyone if you start at the top of your application pile?
* How do you handle applicant number 852, if he’s obviously best qualified for a position that you’ve already given to candidate number 52. Are you ready to move number 52 to his next priority position, even if he would replace even another candidate?
* Or, if you go position by position, how will you know whether the best qualified candidate is available, or already staffed to another priority.
* How do you optimize the balance between employee preferences and the company’s needs?
* How do you ensure a reasonable allocation of genders, ages, competencies, and experience between organizational units, leadership positions, and locations?
And the most important question for every real-world case is: How do we complete this as quickly as possible with as small a team as possible?
So far, I’ve encountered three main ways to handle this problem:
The army way
This method could also be called “The inexperienced change-manager way.” It is often performed in organizations that jump into the process without knowledge of the complexities. First, you allow each employee to apply for a list of positions through e-mail, a web form, or other medium. One of two things usually happens. Alternative 1: Since there’s no available approach to handle the massive amounts of data that are collected, project managers soon regret collecting so much data. Doors are closed and a tiny team allocates people to positions based on a mix of employee wishes, quick evaluations of competency, and the traditional concept of randomness. Alternative 2: When the applications arrive, a team is assembled to work position by position. For each position, candidate info is moved between an original format, Excel sheets, and Word documents a few times. All the while removing unqualified candidates and evaluating relevant candidates. In either case, it takes a long time and results are chaotic because there is a:
* lack of a single data system
* lack of the ability to see candidate process history
* lack of the ability to see the overall picture
No wonder that when staffing decisions are published, the majority of employees are disappointed.
The experienced change management way
In this method, employees don’t get the chance to express their wishes because it would just create unrealistic expectations and unwieldy amounts of data. Rather, the process goes from top to bottom in the organization and each managerial level handles the selection of subordinates. At the same time, management ensures that there is a way to record decisions and handle conflicts of interest. The problem with this approach is that;
* it involves a large number of people in the project
* employee preferences are not considered
* it is difficult to control the balance of gender, competency, etc.
In the case of merger integrations, the use of clean teams to carry out the staffing puzzle before the actual merger date isn’t possible with this method. There are just too many people that would have to be on the project team. However, this approach might get the job done as intended, which is also the reason why it’s used.
The natural role of politics way
This very common method is a mix between the two other methods. It includes politics as an important ingredient, and is mainly a result of bad project management. In this method, employees are allowed to apply for jobs. For example, if a company is downsizing, employees are released from their position and asked to apply for a list of new positions. Most people apply for a position resembling their own current position. So far, no problem. The problem arises because local managers are handling these applications. Staffing ends up being handled through lobbying, trading, and off the record solutions. Since these processes are less tidy and traceable, and there is a lack of unified decision criteria on selecting the employees to leave the organization, actually letting people go becomes legally difficult. For everyone involved, the problematic result is that instead of being let go, employees are “moved down to archives”, “parked in a staff position”, or something similar. Some leave after a while. Some stay for years.
Why doesn’t this create more fuss every time it happens? We’re talking about the work-life future of real people here. In my experience the fuss does happen, but just in a low voice in silent corridors. There is actually a lot of respect for these processes. Never are the walls between organizational levels as thick as when a group talks about staffing decisions. You can only talk to your peers – everyone knows that. So, you just have to assume that there is an invisible team of experts somewhere that follows an unknown best practice approach. There is no single decision maker to point at – it’s anonymized. Besides, no one expects that the puzzle could be re-done just because he or she makes a complaint. If I was an unhappy employee in that situation, I’d just enter a phase of indifference and passiveness until I see the possibility to improve the situation, (e.g., by jumping ship).
via Change Management and Strategic Planning http://change-management.artcony.com/2013/04/how-not-to-staff-employees-during-a-reorganization-or-merger-integration-2/ Matt Sileno 8233 OLD COURTHOUSE ROAD VIENNA VA http://pinterest.com/intuitivegroup/
