Looking Three-sixty

I was listening to Peter Day's Global Business and he was interviewing Vineet Nayar who was explaining some of his management techniques. To reduce his thinking to a single line it would be stated as putting employees first. This runs counter to the paradigm of always prioritising customers. Clearly the model is based primarily from a service company background, but the principles probably extend further. Once again being slightly reductive the thinking is that value for an organisation is created by its employees. Hence the thinking that if they are kept happy then they are more likely to add value.

In many ways this is not revolutionary thinking as a happy workforce is a productive workforce. But what steps can a manager take to start to make this a reality. I would suggest that the possibilities are multiple but one good suggestion was very broad adoption of 360 degree feedback. In HCL all employees were encouraged to feed back on senior managers' performance. The benefits were twofold. Firstly the employees got the opportunity to provide feedback and the managers gained a valuable insight into their performance. Secondly the employees got to see that the senior managers were listening with a desire to improve the organisation and their own performance.

This all seems intuitive when you consider it and I have in the past sought feedback. But never would I have thought of such a wide audience for that feedback. So as we enter the appraisal process I intend to construct a simple online feedback survey. I can the circulate the survey and see what happens. Who knows, I might even learn something.