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Staffing for Quality
Staffing was once much simpler. It used to be a matter of hiring someone for a specific purpose or function, and then ensuring that they performed according to a clearly defined set of expectations. Employees were furnished with information on a "need to know " basis. But now that innovation and excellence are our goals, staffing has become a much more complex endeavour.
Employees who used to work within narrowly defined functional jobs, will now have to collaborate and contribute within team structures such as quality circles, steering committees and self-directed improvement teams. The old practice was to keep employees in functionally defined jobs with little or no oversight of the larger process. Today's enlightened employers must deploy multi-skilled employees to work within process and project teams, and to constantly improve the functioning of both. This demands that they build a detailed understanding of the entire process, and work together with others who have very different sets of skills from their own.
The use of empowered teams is mandatory for the pursuit of quality excellence. Teams of employees must bring their collective insight and intelligence to bear on the increasingly complex problems they must face together. They must be able to gauge the situation for themselves, determine the best course of action, and then execute that course of action flawlessly, without supervision or direction. In effect, they must be responsible for both thinking and doing.
In keeping with this requirement, employees are seen as process managers, not functional specialists. Furthermore, we must view each employee as a customer of the employee who comes before them in the process, and as a supplier to the next employee in the process. Perceiving employees as customers of and suppliers to each other, is the key to understanding the quality parameters of our own operating processes. Doing so helps us to see and measure the quality we produce while we produce it, so that it can be systematically and continuously improved.
The competitive edge of quality excellence is the people in our organizations. Instead of employing them to fill a narrowly defined "slot" in the corporate structure, we must deploy them to contribute as widely as possible. The key to this shift-in-practice, is to value them for their creativity and intelligence. To elicit this creativity and intelligence, employers must provide an environment of symbolic egalitarianism and continuously-evolving challenge. This is the only way to let everyone know they are important for the success of the company. This is made a concrete reality by;
eliminating perks and privileges assigned by rank or position,
eliminating status differentials as much as possible,
enacting wage compression and pay-for-skill practices,
implementing gain sharing, profit sharing and employee ownership,
maintaining a policy of promotion from within,
operating the necessary internal employee development initiatives, and
enabling access to external learning opportunities to further enrich development
In addition, employers must exercise greater selectivity in recruiting. The best way to do this is to offer better-than-average pay, and require more than usual from potential hires. When a company can do this, and enact symbolic egalitarianism, not only will they get the best recruits, but they will spurn them on to really become involved in their work (their work) and become superior performers in the process.
Of course, the field of performance for all employees is quality improvement and innovation. Quality and innovation must be everyone's job. Every member of the organization should spend at least one hour a week tackling quality issues. In the beginning, this will primarily be a matter of training and development. After the initial learning curve has been climbed the focus of activity shifts to implementing new measurement and information systems geared to handle quality data efficiently.
When these self-diagnostic systems are in place the focus shifts again towards real improvement and innovation. To perform within this domain, employees will still need technical skills in a functional area - but this is just for starters. They must also acquire interpersonal skills, problem solving skills and a sense of business judgement that will allow them to hold the correct priorities and make the proper choices for their overall organization.
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