John Linton
Exetel completed its six monthly review of the career plans for each of the 30 full time people we employ over the past four days. Our current concept of this process is to send each person a questionnaire which they complete and send back and then sit down with one of Exetel's directors to go through their answers to the various questions and discuss anything else that either the employee or the director wishes to raise. In my personal experience no company I've ever worked for (except IBM in the 1970s) ever had such a process but I've used it for most of my working life in an always evolving, and hopefully gradually also improving, format/form.
The value of such meetings, as with all meetings between two people in commercial life, is dependent on the amount of thought put in to the meeting 'agenda' prior to the actual meeting. As always there was a range of effort from the 'none at all' to the well considered responses and thoughtful questions - as you would expect.
We tabulate a part of the questionnaire that deals with the individual rating a number of aspects of their employment with Exetel which we compare over time with previous career reviews. The results for this six monthly review were mostly slightly 'more positive' than the July 2007 review (the scores are 0 = totally unhappy to 10 = completely happy):
Current Position - 8.00
Progress (Last 6 months) - 7.55
Peers - 8.41
Current Manager - 9.27
Future Prospects - 7.82
Based on these 'results' compared with the results of similar processes I've been involved with in previous companies there is very little that Exetel need be concerned about in the general operation of the company. However, as always, there were a number of people who expressed concerns with various aspects of their individual roles and/or particular aspects of the ways in which Exetel operate. So the directors/owners are able to look at each individual career review document and make whatever changes/adjustments they believe are appropriate to the ways in which we operate Exetel and also to individual's job responsibilities and future directions to more closely match their current/changed job aspirations.
Small companies like Exetel have very little/no 'fat' in their staffing structures and even the most inexperienced 'manager' knows that someone who is happy in what they are currently doing and is happy that they will continue to be happy in developing their career in their preferred directions and time frames is going to be more of a 'contributor' to the overall objectives of the company than a person who doesn't believe they are in this desired position. So meeting every employee's current and immediate future expectations is THE first requirement of any manager in a commercial enterprise (I'd say in any enterprise but I don't think that's actually true in Australia).
As this process is so simple and straight forward you would think it would be easily accomplished by any commercial entity. My experience in companies I've worked for and also in companies in which I've had a senior management role is that not only isn't it easy, it's almost never possible beyond the sort of size that Exetel is now or the sort of size that IBM was in Australia in the 1970s. I don't know of any other explanation for why individual employee career planning is not an integral part of any commercial company's management focus - but the observable fact is - that it isn't.
My personal view is that people who own and manage their own companies have an intensely real interest in ensuring that the people they hire are the 'right' people and that they look after the people they hire with more very real interest and care - in some ways as 'extensions' of their own families - hence the 200 year old appellation of 'small family business'.
My observations of Australian companies that grow beyond 50 or so employees up to around 500 employees that each step along the employee growth path (say increase in size of each 50 employees as a reasonable estimate) the competence and 'caring' of the management of the company's employees falls alarmingly to the point where at around 450 employees the 'managers/supervisors' of every group of employees within the organisation has fallen to a point where over staffing is likely to be between 50% and 100% greater than is needed and employee happiness would not register above around 6/10.
Multinational companies are 'wealthy' enough and sensible enough to realise that hierarchical management structures need 'policing' and often put in place 'cross company' personnel review processes to overcome the short comings of hierarchical companies (endemic inadequate 'middle' management/supervision). Those companies generally tend to be larger than 500 employees (the sort of size where a 'human resources' function has built up to the size where the overheads of such a process can be afforded/'lost') and more likely larger than 1,000 employees.
I could be quite wrong but that is my personal observation over several decades of working fairly intensely in the Australian IT/Communications industry.
The reasons that I have been thinking about these issues is that, depending on what happens of course, Exetel will begin to reach an employee level where the efficiencies and 'happiness' that we currently enjoy and on which any level of success we have achieved to date is based on, will begin to erode.
We have begun the processes required to change the way we manage the company, and therefore the people within the company, which I believe is essential for a small company to survive and then continue to grow as it loses the efficiencies of 'ownership management'. I think, among all of the other difficulties that 2008 is already bringing - the quality of personnel development will remain the difference between continuing 'success' and some form of 'less than success'.