Chapter 4- Workforce Focus

After you read this chapter, you should be able to

 Discuss the importance of workforce satisfaction and employee engagement
 Distinguish the difference between traditional workforce management practices and
enhancement of employee involvement in problem solving
 Describe the principle of successful employee empowerment
 Relate and linking engagement and empowerment to theories of motivation

Core Values
“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a
future and a hope.” - Jeremiah 29:11

Learning Activities and resources

J.R. Evans, W.M. Lindsay. (2019). Total Quality Management. Cengage
DA Collier, J. Evans, W. Lindsay. (2020). Operations Management and Total Quality Management. Cengage

Introduction
Organizations are learning that to satisfy customers, they must first satisfy the workforce. Workforce
refers to everyone who is actively involved in accomplishing the work of an organization. This
encompasses paid employees as well as volunteers and contract employees, and includes team leaders,
supervisors, and managers at all levels.
Many companies refer to their employees as “associates” or “partners” to signify the importance that
people have in driving business performance.
The workforce is an important component of a basic quality system. ISO 9000:2000 includes several
workforce-focused requirements. The standards require that “Personnel performing work affecting
product quality shall be competent on the basis of appropriate education, skills, training and experience”.
They further require that organizations determine the level of competence, evaluate the effectiveness of
training or other action taken, ensure that employees are aware of how their work contributes to quality
objectives and maintain appropriate records of education, training and experience.
The standard also addresses the work environment from the standard point of providing buildings,
workspace, utilities, equipment, and supporting services needed to achieve conformance to product
requirements, as well as determining and managing the work environment, including safety, ergonomics,
and environmental factors.

Workforce Focus in ISO 9000

 Personnel performing work affecting product quality shall be competent on the basis of
appropriate education, training, skills, and experience.
 Organizations should determine the level of competence that employees need, provide training
or other means to ensure competency, evaluate the effectiveness of training or other actions
taken, ensure that employees are aware of how their work contributes to quality objectives, and
maintain appropriate records of education, training, and experience.
 The standards address the work environment from the standpoint of providing buildings,
workspace, utilities, equipment, and supporting services needed to achieve conformity to product
requirements, as well as determining and managing the work environment, including safety,
ergonomics, and environmental factors.
Key Workforce-Focused Practices for Performance Excellence
 Understand the key factors that drive workforce engagement, satisfaction, and motivation.
 Design and manage work and jobs to promote effective communication, cooperation, skill
sharing, empowerment, innovation, and the ability to benefit from diverse ideas and thinking of
employees and develop an organizational culture conducive to high performance and motivation.
 Make appropriate investments in development and learning, both for the workforce and the
organization’s leaders.
 Create an environment that ensures and improves workplace health, safety, and security, and
supports the workforce via policies, services, and benefits.
 Develop a performance management system based on compensation, recognition, reward, and
incentives that supports high performance work and workforce engagement.
 Assess workforce engagement and satisfaction and use results for improvement.
 Assess workforce capability and capacity needs and use the results to capitalize on core
competencies, address strategic challenges, recruit and retain skilled and competent people, and
accomplish the work of the organization.
 Manage career progression for the entire workforce and succession planning for management
and leadership positions.

Quality Profile: PRO-TEC Coating Company

 A joint venture between United States Steel Corporation and Kobe Steel Ltd. of Japan, providing
coated sheet steel primarily to the U.S. automotive industry.
 Culture centered around three fundamental concepts—ownership, responsibility, and
accountability.
 Associates work in self-directed teams and are empowered, innovative leaders who fix problems
as they are identified.

Evolution of Workforce Management

The role of people at work certainly changed as business and technology evolved over the years. Prior to
Industrial Revolution, skilled craftpeople had a major stake in the quality of their products because their
families’ livelihoods depended on the sale of those product.
Frederict W. Taylor promulgated the departure from craftmanship concept. Taylor system and scientific
management
 Improved productivity
 Changed manufacturing work into series of mundane and mindless tasks
 Promulgated adversarial relationships between labor and management
 Failed to exploit the knowledge and creativity of the workforce

Workforce Management
Workforce management (which has also been widely known as human resource management, or HRM)
consists of those activities designed to provide for and coordinate the people of an organization.
 Determining the organization’s workforce needs;
 assisting in the design of work systems;
 Recruiting, selecting, training and developing, counseling, motivating, and rewarding employees;
 Acting as a liaison with unions and government organizations; and handling other matters of
employee well-being.
Strategic Human Resource Management
Concerned with the contributions HR strategies make to organizational effectiveness, and how these
contributions are accomplished. It involves designing and implementing a set of internally consistent
policies and practices to ensure that an organization’s human capital (employees’ collective knowledge,
skills, and abilities) contributes to overall business objectives.
Research shows that strategic human resource management practices are positively associated with
organizational performance indicators such as share price, profits, net sales per employee, gross rate of
return on assets, employee retention, employee attitudes, and customer retention rates.

High Performance Work Culture

Performance - the extent to which an individual contributes to achieving the goals and objectives of an
organization.
High-performance work - work approaches used to systematically pursue ever-higher levels of overall
organizational and human performance.
Characterized by:
 flexibility
 innovation
 knowledge and skill sharing
 alignment with organizational directions, customer focus, and rapid response to changing
business needs and marketplace requirements

Kay Kendall and Glenn Bodison propose five “Conditions of Collaboration” that characterized a culture of
high performance: respect, aligned values, shared purpose, communication and trust.
 Respect – means believing in the inherent worth of another person. Respect also is taking into
consideration the views and desires of others. When you respect another person, you consider
what is important to him or her when you are planning and making decisions.
 Values – are the guiding principles and behaviors that embody how organization and its people
are expected to operate. Values reflect and reinforce an organization’s culture. Aligned values
create a congruency between what the organization stands for and the personal beliefs of the
individual.
 Purpose – is the fundamental reason an organizations exists. It inspire an organization and guides
its setting values.
 Communication – is often cited as one of the most important factors related to employee
motivation. Communication that flows freely in all directions promotes collaborations.
 Trust – that management trusts the workforce and vice-versa I vital. A survey by Annandale,
Virginia-based Mastery Works Inc. concluded that employees leave their organization because of
trust, observing that “Lack of trust was an issue with almost every person who had left an
organization.”
These attributes are usually evident in companies that are recognized as outstanding places to work.

Workforce Engagement
Refers to the extent of workforce commitment, both emotional and intellectual, to accomplishing the
work, mission, and vision of the organization. Engaged workers
 Find personal meaning and motivation in their work,
 Have a strong emotional bond to their organization, are actively involved in and committed to
their work,
 Feel that their jobs are important, know that their opinions and ideas have value, and
 Often go beyond their immediate job responsibilities for the good of the organization.
Advantages of Workforce Engagement
 Replaces the adversarial mentality with trust and cooperation
 Develops the skills and leadership capability of individuals, creating a sense of mission and
fostering trust
 Increases employee morale and commitment to the organization
 Fosters creativity and innovation, the source of competitive advantage
 Helps people understand quality principles and instills these principles into the corporate culture
 Allows employees to solve problems at the source immediately
 Improves quality and productivity
Every organizations has a unique culture. What drives employee engagement will differ among different
organizations. Thus, every organization should conduct its own research to determine the drivers of
engagement.

Top Drivers of Workforce Engagement

1. Commitment to organizational values.
2. Knowing that customers are satisfied with products and services.
3. Belief that opinions count.
4. Clearly understanding work expectations.
5. Understanding of how personal contributions help meet customer needs.
6. Being recognized and rewarded fairly.
7. Knowing that senior leaders value the workforce.
8. Being treated equally with respect.
9. Being able to concentrate on the job and work processes.
10. Alignment of personal work objectives to work plans

Employee Involvement (EI)

Engagement begins with involvement. Employee Involvement refers to any activity by which employees
participate in work-related decisions and improvement activities, with the objectives of tapping the
creative energies of all employees and improving their motivation.

Motivation
Motivation - an individual’s response to a felt need. Saul W. Gellerman defined motivation as “the art of
creating conditions that allow every one of us, warts and all, to get his work done at his own peak level of
efficiency”
Classification of Motivation Theories
 Content Theories (Maslow; MacGregor; Herzberg)
 Process Theories (Vroom; Porter & Lawler)
 Environmentally-based Theories (Skinner; Adams; Bandura, Snyder, & Williams)
Designing High-Performance Work Systems
 Work and Job Design
 Empowerment
 Teamwork
 Work Environment
 Workforce Learning and Development
 Compensation and Recognition
 Performance Management

Work and Job Design

Work design refers to how employees are organized in formal and informal units, such as departments
and teams. Job design refers to responsibilities and tasks assigned to individuals. Both work and job design
are vital to organizational

Enhancing Work Design

 Job enlargement – expanding workers’ jobs
 Job rotation – having workers learn several tasks and rotate among them
 Job enrichment – granting more authority, responsibility, and autonomy

Hackman-Oldham Model
The model proposes that five core characteristics of job design (task significance, task identity, skill variety,
autonomy, and feedback from the job) influence three critical psychological states (experienced
meaningfulness, experienced responsibility, and knowledge of results), which in turn, drive work
outcomes (employee motivation, growth satisfaction, overall job satisfaction, and work effectiveness).

Empowerment
Giving people authority to make decisions based on what they feel is right, to have control over their
work, to take risks and learn from mistakes, and to promote change.
“A sincere belief and trust in people.”

Empowered employees must have the wisdom to know what to do and when to do it, the motivation to
do it, and the right tools to accomplish the task. These requirements may mean significant changes in
work system, specially, the following:
 Provide education, resources, and encouragement
 Remove restrictive policies/procedures
 Foster an atmosphere of trust
 Share information freely
 Make work valuable
 Train managers in “hands-off” leadership
 Train employees in allowed latitude

Teamwork
Perhaps one of the most significant organizational changes that has resulted form total quality is
teamwork. A singe person rarely has enough knowledge or experience to understand all aspects of the
most important work processes; thus, team approaches are essential for achieving quality and
performance excellence.
Team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose,
set of performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.
Many types of teams exist in different companies and industries. Among the most common are the
following:
 Management teams – teams consisting mainly of managers from various functions, such as sales
and production that coordinate work among teams.
 Natural work teams – teams organized to perform the entire job, rather that specialized,
assembly line-type work.
 Self managed teams – specially empowered work teams defined as “a highly trained group of
employees, from 6 to 18, on average, fully responsible for turning out well-defined segment of
finished work also known as self-directed work teams.
 Virtual teams – teams in which members communicate by computer, take turns as leaders, and
jump in and out as necessary. These types of teams use a combination of cloud computing, e-mail,
video conferencing, and shared computer screen technologies to get their job done.
 Quality circles – team of worker and supervisors that meet regularly to address work-related
problems involving quality and productivity.
 Problem solving teams – teams whose members gather to solve a specific problem and the
disband.
 Project teams – teams with a specific mission to develop something new or to accomplish a
complex task.

Team Skill Requirements

 Conflict management and resolution. Involves dealing proactively with disagreements that may
occur when two or more technical experts together.
 Team Management. Involves ensuring that project members remain focused on the goals, time
frame, and costs of their part of project.
 Leadership skills. Require that the project leader guide the work of the team, including team
development, while managing upward to the project champion and outward to other project
teams and team leader.
 Decision making. Requires that good decisions be made in timely fashion.
 Communication. Channels must be established and maintained throughout the course of the
project.
 Negotiation. Is needed in order to secure the resources required for successful project
completion.
 Cross-cultural training. May involved team members of other nationalities, or it may simply
involve people from different functional areas with divergent points of view.

Life Cycle of Teams

 Forming takes place when the team is introduced, meets together, and explores issues of their
new assignment.
 Storming occurs when team members disagree on team roles and challenge the way that the
team will function.
 Norming takes place when the issues of the previous stage have been worked out, and team
members agree on roles, ground rules, and acceptable behavior when doing the work of the team.
 Performing characterizes the productive phase of the life cycle when team members cooperate
to solve problems and complete the goals of their assigned work.
 Adjourning is the phase in which the team wraps up the project, satisfactorily completes its goals,
and prepares to disband or move on to another project.
Peter Scholtes, a leading authority on teams for quality improvement, suggested 10 ingredients for a
successful team. These items provide some guidance during the forming stage and can mitigate issues
that might lead to “storming’:
 Clarity in team goals
 Improvement plan
 Clearly defined roles
 Clear communication
 Beneficial team behaviors
 Well-defined decision procedures
 Balanced participation
 Established ground rules
 Awareness of group process
 Use of scientific approach

Workplace Environment
Because employees are key stakeholders of any organization, their health, safety, and overall being are
important factors in the work environment. Health and safety have always been priorities in most
companies, but working conditions now extend beyond basic issues of keeping the work area safe and
clean.

Workforce Learning and Development

 Research indicates that companies that spend heavily on training their workers outperform
companies that spend considerably less, as measured on the basis of overall stock market returns.
 Focus on both what people need to know as well as what things they need to know how to do.
 Continual reinforcement of knowledge learned is essential.

Compensation and Recognition

 Compensation and recognition refer to all aspects of pay and reward, including promotions,
bonuses, and recognition, either monetary and nonmonetary or individual and group.
 Compensation
 Merit versus capability/performance based plans
 Gainsharing
 Recognition
 Monetary or non-monetary
 Formal or informal
 Individual or group

Effective Recognition and Reward Strategies

 Give both individual and team awards
 Involve everyone
 Tie rewards to quality
 Allow peers and customers to nominate and recognize superior performance
 Publicize extensively
 Make recognition fun
Performance Management
Considerable truth can be found in the statement, “how one is evaluated determines how one performs”.
Performance appraisal is a process for subjectively evaluating the quality of an employee’s work.
However, performance appraisal is an exceedingly difficulty activity. Organizations typically use
performance appraisals to provide feedback to employees who can the recognize and build on their
strengths and work on their weaknesses (that is opportunity for improvement), determine trainings need,
allocate compensation and rewards, identify individuals to promote, asses the pool of talent across the
organization, and identify the best and worst performers.
 How you are measured is how you perform!
 Conventional performance appraisal systems
 Focus on short-term results and individual behavior; fail to deal with uncontrollable
factors
 New approaches
 Focus on company goals such as quality and behaviors like teamwork
 360-degree feedback; mastery descriptions

Assessing Workforce Effectiveness, Satisfaction, and Engagement

Outcome Measures
Number of teams, rate of growth, percentage of employees involved, number of suggestions
implemented, time taken to respond to suggestions, employee turnover, absenteeism, and grievances;
perceptions of teamwork and management effectiveness, engagement, satisfaction, and empowerment.
Process Measures
Number of suggestions that employees make, numbers of participants in project teams, participation in
educational programs, average time it takes to complete a process improvement project, whether teams
are getting better, smarter, and faster at performing improvements, improvements in team selection and
planning processes, frequency of use of quality improvement tools, employee understanding of problem-
solving approaches, and senior management involvement.

Gallup Engagement Index Classification

Gallup analyzes the survey results and creates an “engagement index” that assigns people into three
categories:
1. Engaged employees who work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company.
They drive innovation and move the organization forward.
2. Not-engaged employees who are essentially “checked out.” They are sleepwalking through their
workday. They are putting in time, but not enough energy or passion into their work.
3. Actively disengaged employees who aren’t just unhappy at work; they’re busy acting out their
unhappiness. Every day, these workers undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish.

Sustaining High-Performance Work Systems

Regular assessment of
 workforce capability and capacity needs;
 hiring, training and retention of employees; and
 career progression and succession planning
Workforce Capability and Capacity
Workforce capability refers to an organization’s ability to accomplish its work processes through the
knowledge, skills, abilities, and competencies of its people.
Workforce capacity refers to an organization’s ability to ensure sufficient staffing levels to accomplish its
work processes and successfully deliver products and services to customers, including the ability to meet
seasonal or varying demand levels.

Effective Hiring Practices

 Determine key employee skills and competencies
 Identify job candidates based on required skills and competencies
 Screen job candidates to predict suitability and match to jobs

Succession Planning. Succession planning is vital to long-term sustainability.

 Formal processes to identify, develop, and position future leaders
 Mentoring, coaching, and job rotation
 Career paths and progression for all employees

Summary
Workforce focus:
 Refers to everyone who is actively involved in accomplishing the work of an organization.
 Encompasses paid employees as well as volunteers and contract employees, and includes team
leaders, supervisors, and managers at all levels.
 Any companies refer to their employees as “associates” or “partners” to signify the importance
that people have in driving business performance.
 Workforce satisfaction is strongly related to customer satisfaction and, ultimately, to business
performance.

Review Questions!
 Define workforce management. What are the activities included under workforce
management? What are the objectives of an effective workforce management system?
 What advantages does employee engagement offer to an organization over traditional
management practices?
 List some of the advantages offered by teamwork.
 Why is it important to assess workforce engagement and satisfaction? How do organizations
measure workforce effectiveness?
 How has the hiring criteria changed in the recent years? List some of the innovative
approaches being used by organizations to recruit employees.