In his daily post for TLNT, Larry Haun suggested that the question before many organizations in time of economic hardship is whether you cut hours or reduce staff? Larry Haun, who is the community director for ERE.net makes some very good points. The difficulty here is that the response is based on an employee being just another number on the expense sheet.
We would suggest that if you take an alternative view of the role of the employee to be that of a non-owned capital asset that is one of the reasons you are still functioning as an organization then there is a third alternative. If we take a page from GE and change the view of the HR process to be one of continuous process improvement we can offer a third alternative. By removing the process steps that are non-value added (they are not requested by our customers) and ensuring that our processes are repeatable every time we conduct them, then the alternative is we can raise revenues by removing the non-value added steps.
James Womack in his book Lean Thinking suggests that unless the organization is close to bankruptcy, then lean or lean six sigma efforts should not call for layoffs. They should actually enhance the worklevels of the employees due to the opening of opportunity in other departments and through the introduction of new products and services.
Are you stuck in the silo of employees as an expense or have you realized they are a valuable asset and maximizing your human capital?
No comments:
Post a Comment