Berry Because Your People Matter

A Playbook for Managers, Entrepreneurs, and Leaders
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-80381-356-1
Verlag: Grosvenor House Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 368 Seiten

Many proclaim the value of leaders. Many revere entrepreneurs, as if that's all that's needed. And yet someone - the manager - must embrace leadership and be entrepreneurial while building and running their firm to meet stakeholder expectations. The manager structures the firm and hires and organises the people. They develop necessary technology. They motivate, develop, and reward their people, while ensuring their wellbeing. And they drive change, ultimately securing their firm's productivity and sustainability. This book details how management of the firm should be done. It builds practical models that managers can follow to get the very best out of their people. This third edition considers recent international events such as the COVID pandemic that have changed the very nature of work itself.

John Berry is an alumnus of Loughborough University, the Open University Business School and Birkbeck, University of London, in engineering, management and organisational psychology. He has run technology and engineering companies and led R&D activities in SMEs and multi-nationals for over 30 years. He has been instrumental in driving corporate and public policy across technology and engineering for firms and governments. In a global career, John has led teams in 32 countries. He is a Chartered Manager and a Chartered Engineer. He is now a management consultant with TimelessTime Ltd.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Berry, John

Berry, Sue

Leseproben

Preface to the Third Edition

The first edition of Because Your People Matter was published in early 2019. The second edition followed in August 2020. Since then, much has happened. In business and employment, the World is arguably a very different place. This third edition covers the skills and knowledge necessary to understand and act in response to the many new pressures on managers.

The Covid pandemic struck in early 2020, with the first national lockdown in March. Wellbeing took centre stage, focussed on NHS and care sector staff, teachers, and a raft of ‘essential workers’ like couriers and supermarket drivers. Everyone watching social media and the press suddenly understood who earned what, with what risk, and for what effort expended. Of course, there was nothing completely new in what we saw (public sectors had been underfunded for years and we’d always known that certain ‘gig’ jobs were dire) – but the pandemic highlighted existing strains. As we exit the panic stage and now ‘learn to live with Covid’, those strains play out in stressed employee relations. The public now knows much of the management jargon like ‘redundancies’ and ‘gig economy’ through repetition daily, and they understand the variables of productivity and some of the sensitivities in supply.

As Covid subsided, at least for the time being, what emerged was a significant shift in employee thinking. Around 50% of employees had worked from home at the height of the pandemic, enjoying the experience, reducing commuting costs and recovering up to six hours a day of wasted personal time. Possibly as a result, many employees questioned what working life had been about pre-Covid. Many re-assessed what they wanted from work in the future. Post Covid, managers found that employees were quitting in significant numbers. In the USA the phenomenon of mass quitting became known as the Great Resignation. In response, we’ve discussed here why employees quit and what managers can do to engender commitment and secure a reasonable length of employee tenure.

Even if employees didn’t quit, they did reassess both sides of the psychological contract. Many employers re-assessed their side of the deal and offered flexible working, with many introducing mixed regimes of home working and in-office attendance. Many senior managers, though, mandated that employees return. In April 2022, it was widely reported that Government Ministers had demanded that civil servants must all return. In summary, some firms changed toward flexibility while others did not. This shift from rigidity to flexibility for some continues, and more firms than ever are expanding their thinking by experimenting with a four-day week. Flexible working has now become a clear differentiator between firms in attracting staff.

As authors, we are agnostic about what managers should do about home working and the four-day week. We argue that managers must investigate what their firm needs and, in consultation with employees, reach a decision. In this third edition, we cover the issue of working from home in some detail, highlighting not just the potential advantages, but the significant difficulties that it may bring. It’s for managers to balance the arguments and do what’s right.

Before, during and after Covid, the number of job vacancies rose in the UK. In March 2022, there were 1,247,000 job vacancies. That’s up by 462,000 on pre-Covid times. It’s exacerbated by the UK’s not-so-great-but-still-significant resignation, led by professionals like doctors and teachers retiring early. By anyone’s assessment, that’s a huge increase in jobs, made starker by the parallel reported figure of 1,296,000 jobless workers. At the time of writing, there are more job vacancies than job seekers and many firms report a simple inability to fill vacancies. One of the main explanations for the imbalance and problem is that the job seekers lack the skills and knowledge to do the jobs that are available. This suggests that the country has not re-skilled its workforce considering technology change, placing the onus for re-skilling on managers. This makes our chapter on developing people very relevant.

Covid highlighted huge inequities between employees. Some were paid full or at least near-full salary by their employers during absence when testing positive for the virus – they were paid what’s termed Company Sick Pay (CSP). Others had to rely on Statutory Sick Pay of less that £100 a week. This highlighted that in the earlier editions we had not adequately described Company Sick Pay as part of employee conditions. That’s corrected now and we suggest a model that managers might adopt to offer CSP while not inflicting too high a burden on the P&L.

In the period since we published the second edition, there have been many reports of managers behaving badly. Perhaps the most absurd action was taken by the MD of P&O Ferries. He dismissed about 800 employees, reaching settlement agreements with all but one to avoid tribunal claims. Those settlement agreements are reported to have cost P&O Ferries £36.5m. In his business case for the action, he cited the need to halve the salary budget. This could only be achieved, he said, by dismissing the UK employees and bringing on Indian workers to crew his ferries, engaged through an agency in Mumbai. We cover the detail of how this is possible in the sections about employing foreign workers and about dismissing employees by reason of redundancy. It seems likely that P&O will suffer the reputational fallout from this for some time to come.

This notion that managers seem to be behaving badly – or at least don’t know how to behave – prompted us to write a chapter on how to become a manager. As managers who have benefitted from extensive training and development, we naturally advocate formal skills and knowledge acquisition along with experience. Our new chapter covers the arguments in favour of learning management and the methods by which managers can advance from trainee to expert. We maintain that management is the overarching competence in business – in the end, all who accept great business aims must manage people well. It’s time that those who style themselves as entrepreneurs and leaders accepted that simple idea. Management is non-obvious and must be learned.

Part of that learning includes understanding and overcoming some of the many problems that occur through bias in management decision-making. Bias is a huge subject, and we cover it in seven new sections spanning definition of bias, examples of bias (and specifically manager bias), prejudice, and equality including gender equality. We then suggest a management approach.

In the period since the second edition, we have sensed that managers have moved away from their employees – physically and metaphorically. In managing remote employees, management has certainly become more complex, and it seems managers are becoming disinclined to engage. We evidence this in the development of new staff roles to which management is sub-contracted. The most obtuse example is the role of Chief Happiness Officer. When we had responsibility for departments and whole firms, we readily accepted the obligation to secure employee wellbeing. As we argue in many sections of this third edition, management is a contact sport. Obligations like wellbeing can’t be sub-contracted. We’re saddened too that some of the management institutions have supported such evolution.

As a counter to this increased complexity, we again emphasise our two central models – the feed forward model and the feedback model. We continue to emphasise the idea that managers must intervene in their employees’ working lives to maintain performance, improve outcomes, and make change. In the end, with tools like the feed-forward and feedback models, managers can gain expertise, become competent, and intervene with confidence in the variables needed to drive their firms forward.

Recently, we learned that in response to falling organisational performance, the London Ambulance Service was recruiting volunteers to attend the lowest category call-out. This, it hoped, would free-up ambulances to relieve those tied up at hospital accident and emergency departments and aid performance recovery. Again, we are agnostic about this. If that’s what’s needed, then it’s perhaps a valid management response. But it has prompted us to write sections on finding, engaging and motivating volunteers – whether in organisations who predominately engage volunteers, or in those where a few volunteers augment many employees. We have many years of experience with the UK’s largest youth organisation as volunteers and have completed many consulting assignments in the voluntary sector. We write from positions of experience and theoretical understanding and hopefully this brings some benefit to managers in the third sector.

Finally, we urge managers to be prepared; to be ready to exploit opportunity. We again suggest that opportunity favours the prepared firm. Between Brexit, Coronavirus, the war in Ukraine, and now a hard, right-wing government, there’s significant turmoil in industries and markets. Technology too continues its relentless grind as investors fund innovation and invention in pursuit of profit, with daily stories of how machines running automation and AI ‘stole’ employees’ jobs. It’s difficult for any manager today to avoid change through technology but technology can be...