Best Employers

In March this year the Australian and New Zealand Best Employer Report was produced in the AFR BOSS magazine. This year Fedex( New Zealand) was a joint winner with Salesforce. All the companies on the list of best employers are successful businesses and admired or regarded jealously by their competitors. Hewitt Associates are the creators of the report and in the highlights report there is a couple of things that are mentioned as to the success of the companies that make the list.

• Identifies and acts on the basis that their people are their primary source of performance, competitive advantage and longer–term sustainability and focus;
• Insists upon a customer focus; and
  
• Maintains and evolves alignment between the organisation’s goals and strategy and its structure, culture, systems and people practices. Such alignment delivers higher performance.

Funny thing about this is, it is what is taught in management school, doesn't anyone listen in class, its not rocket science. You were taught it in class and if you have a higher management degree and your company is not making the list what are you doing. To the companies that are not on the list or have never made the list do you have any management graduates, if not why not? maybe you are missing out on something.
This is widely written about in text books, other publications abound with either the same information or wider information on the issues of people management and the effects that they have on bottom line success. As an employee of different organizations I have tried a few different styles out and the places where people were more productive behaved closer to these objectives.
I often wonder why Australian business does not excel in the word to the same extent our sports people do and I think that the fact that a lot more successful companies are not on this list shows how far short of the success that they could have the really are when you take into account the fact they don't maximise the return on a major asset.
Funny thing is if the business spent as much on other equipment without the returns they would be mad as hell and doing something to fix it and funny the first thing they do is try and fix it, tune it conduct repairs and anything else before scrapping it. Yet many businesses will churn employees simply because they cant do these things and peoples interest wanes there and they leave. No one tries to tune and repair the problems with their employees. The simply scrap them by letting them walk out the door.

See ya round

Peter