When team members were asked as a topic of interest on a comprehensive assessment to evaluate organizations as to their position as a Meaningful Employment Environment, only 56% of respondents indicated that they believe their company makes organizational decisions with people’s best interests in mind.
The foundation of every organization is its people. Pretty simple concept, right? Most business leaders would likely agree with it. But what does it mean to be a foundation? We throw that out all of the time, but do we really know what it means? The definitional paraphrase of a foundation is that it is something that is a structure or idea that lies underneath something else, supporting and steadying it so that it can succeed at whatever it is supposed to do. For a house, the foundation allows it to stand. For a business, the foundation allows it to operate.
So, if the foundation of every organization is its people, it is reasonable to believe that organizations tailor their designs, decisions and decrees to be people-centric, protecting and enhancing this valuable resource on which so much of their success depends. However, what we all know to be true is that, many times, organizations fall short of this. Our research is beginning to back this up.
When team members were asked as a topic of interest on a comprehensive assessment to evaluate organizations as to their position as a Meaningful Employment Environment, only 56% of respondents indicated that they believe their company makes organizational decisions with people’s best interests in mind. These weren’t only responses from frontline team members calling “foul” due to their hierarchical distance from the top of the organization either. These views were shared by senior leaders as well.
Where do most of these organizational decisions show up? In company policy, of course. After speaking with many very well-intentioned business leaders whose organizations would later need their own mea culpa for having misplaced, outdated or even confused company policies that are not very people-friendly, we hypothesize that many of these issues are the result of unintentional precedence and entropy. Organizations are not trying to place barriers between meaningfulness and their people when they create corporate policies, but it is easy for their people to get lost in the shuffle when trying to balance the legal, financial and regulatory influences that are present.
Therefore, it’s time to reevaluate our processes for creating and updating policies that affect people in the workplace. It’s time to put our people first when publishing the next draft of our corporate handbooks. Here are three essential questions to ask when creating or updating policies that will help point the organizational compass to its truest north…its people.
1. What is the outcome that we want this policy to achieve for the organization and its people? Whether it is creating a benefit or drafting a code of conduct, it is way too easy to do a little benchmarking and simply follow convention for developing the language that we will use for our policy without actually asking ourselves what we want this policy to do. We must turn the autopilot off and ask ourselves what the homerun looks like for the organization when people interact correctly with this policy.
2. Does this policy assume the best in people within the organization? This question may feel a bit loaded, but it has deep ramifications for the tone of the culture and how people are seen in the eyes of the organization. Policies that believe the best in people rather than assuming the worst in them are more likely to create a climate of professionalism and ownership than those that set a more negative tone. As one of the core goals of an organization should be to instill trust between team members, the leaders and the business itself, policies that assume the best in people create an affirming confidence in team members from day one.
3. Does this policy empower leaders to do the right thing for their people? Drafting policies can be very tricky. Simple and straightforward takes a lot more work than complex and convoluted does. And, to achieve that simplicity, an organization must have strong leaders that can operate correctly when forced to read between the lines. This is what we want: leaders that are capable of executing policy decisions as part of the shared mission of the organization and its people. When an organization does not have enough faith in its leaders, or perhaps too much faith in its bureaucracy, policies get written with so much rigidity and limitation that leaders can unfortunately feel suffocated and handcuffed by them.
These three questions won’t guarantee perfect results, but they will definitely steer the organization in the direction of its people. When we effort to build a Meaningful Employment Environment we have to start somewhere, so why not begin with something as foundational as organizational policy? It will support so much of what comes next!
About the Author:
Clint McCrystal is a leader in product development for TrailPath Workplace Solutions, a people and organizational development company. TWS offers a disciplined learning and business management system focused on building Meaningful Employment Environments where both people and organizations thrive. Prior to joining the TWS team, Clint developed people and processes as an operator, instructor, and consultant for multiple supply chain companies.
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