People Results

Why are People Results Important ?

Motivated and satisfied People are essential to success because they are the resource that differentiates your organisation. People provide the inspiration,creativity, vision and motivation that keeps an organisation alive. They provide the skills and competencies necessary to make an organisation work. And of course they provide the labour that produces the goods and services that an organisation supplies. They are a major and, many would say, the most important resource that an organisation has.

People who have no job satisfaction (motivation, enthusiasm, commitment) are not productive as they could be. They will not give your customers the best service, they won’t bother if they produce errors, they won’t be innovative and won’t optimise use of resources.

In order for People to be satisfied with their job and motivated to do their best, they need to be convinced that the organisation acts in their best interest, provides them with the facilities, tools and techniques to do their job properly and is concerned for them both in the short-term and through longer term career development. People are also concerned with how their organisation is perceived by the outside world. They realize that, on the long term, this outsideperception indicates the probability of secured and rewarding employment.

You need to know how people feel, behave and perform in your organisation. This gives you the basis to increase productivity, solve issues, celebrate achievements. Knowing your People Results, in order to be able to act upon them, is an essential part of the delivery of your strategy.

Starting with the Enablers.

People results are influenced by how you manage your people, how you implement your strategy and how you manage your processes. All these factors, which are covered by the Enabler Criteria within the EFQM Excellence Model, will strongly influence how your people feel about working in your organisation. PeopleResults are a very important tool in understanding where and how to improve your people management.

How do you Measure and Report People Results ?

2.1. Choosing the right measures
There are many different measures that you can use to gain an insight into what your People think, but first, you have to consider what are the fundamental drivers that motivate and satisfy People (Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs).

People are motivated to satisfy the lower level needs before they can move to the higher levels. Within each need however, everyone has different specific wants. So, in order to understand your People and the focus of their motivation, you need to understand how they are acting and how they perceive themselves within the “need” hierarchy. You also need to understand the specifics of what they want. Measures that enable you to do this are the most useful and also help you identify how to improve your people results.

Within the EFQM Excellence Model, two categories of measures are identified:

• Perception Measures: are of the People’s perception of the organisation.
• Performance Measures: are the internal ones used by the organisation to monitor, understand, predict and improve the performance of the organisation’s People and to predict their perceptions.

2.2. Perception Measures.
Perception Measures are how People feel about themselves, their job and about the organisation. These are subjective measures but should be treated seriously as they provide you with a very useful indicator of the health of the relationship between the organisation and its People. As these measures focus on the effect of what has already happened, they are sometimes called Lagging Indicators.

People’s perceptions of the organisation can be measured through their assessment of two main factors: their motivation and their satisfaction.
It is important to understand that, although motivation and satisfaction are inter-related, they do in fact have very different consequences. A person who is happy with the terms and conditions of their job may be satisfied but not necessarily motivated. Someone who agrees with the organisation’s strategy and relates to its leaders may be highly motivated to succeed but may not be satisfied with the pay

To measure your People’s perception, you need to look at the topics that are important to your organisation, but it is insufficient to know what people think about an issue without understanding their view of the importance of the issue.

2.3. Performance Measures.
Performance Measures are measures of independent internal indicators showing how well People are performing. They can also be used to help predict future performance and perceptions and are sometimes called Leading Indicators. Performance indicators identified in the EFQM Excellence Model are categorised into 5 sections:

• Involvement and engagement.
• Target setting, competency and performance management.
• Leadership performance.
• Training and career development.
• Internal communications.

2.4. The Path to Excellent Results.
The Excellence of the Result is determined by the degree to which an organisation can demonstrate trends, targets and comparisons (numerically) with clear references to causes and the presentation of a set of results that correspond to the range of activities and the size and nature of the organisations.

- Setting Targets: The targets need to be relevant in terms of the organisation’s declared aspiration and should be demonstrably stretching in a direction that supports your business strategy and not easily achieved without effort.
- Trends: the EFQM Excellence Model encourages organisations to plan and manage for repeated, durable good performance (at least 3 years).
- Benchmark data: you can Benchmark processes, organisations and/or metrics (measurements).

2.5. Getting started.
The most common technique is the staff survey, but there are others that you can use too. You will find numerous staff survey formats in books, Internet, HR department... Whatever the tools you choose, you will then need to follow a very similar process and survey structure (you can improve it). Once you have established a structure, try to keep it so that you can do year on year comparisons. Try to repeat your data gathering at least annually. The results need to be segmented to understand the needs and expectations of specific groups within your organisation.

Communicating and Acting on your People Results ?

Once you have done all explained before, it is important to ensure that you tell People what the Results are, because people don’t like being asked to give opinions without receiving feedback. Besides, communicating the results gives you a golden opportunity to get them involved. There are myriad of different media for communicating the results to your people, so choose the best to your organisation.

In order to be credible to your people, they need to see the complete picture and be convinced that the organisation is being open and honest with them.