Fluent Essays

Develop a 2-3 page summary - See attachment for details  *** No Plagiarism *** APA citing 1 Social Media 1 Week 6 Assignment: Performance Consulting, Persuasive Communications and Influence Interventions Assignment You will create a summary for your proposal that will be submitted this week. Choose either one of the following from The Performance Consultant’s Field Book - See attachment · “Interventions at the Individual, Work Group, Department, and Division Levels” (p. 175) or · “The Families of Interventions” (p. 176) from The Performance Consultant’s Field Book · Which interventions are suited to your client organization? · Why? · 2-3 page summary · APA citing · No plagiarism Interventions In this fieldbook, the term intervention refers to any program, communication, or event intended to improve organizational and people performance. Organizations implement changes and adopt programs in the hope of improving productivity and performance. Those changes and programs frequently require a major investment in time and dollars. The changes companies implement and the programs they fund redefine work and work relationships. They affect people’s lives. Consider the following situations.  FIELD NOTES: EXAMPLES OF INTERVENTIONS · A bank opened an elementary school (K–8) on site. · An insurance company installed an expert system for claims handling. · A direct sales merchandiser decided to certify its product trainers. · A multinational company installed an intranet so all of its sites could more efficiently communicate with each other. · A manufacturer organized its production line employees into self-managed teams. · A field office required all employees to attend a sexual harassment class. · A retailer met with its distributor and paper bag manufacturer to standardize packaging sizes. · A restaurant chain set criteria for determining the salary level of key jobs. What these situations have in common is that the organization did something to solve a business problem. It is unclear, however, what the chosen solution was expected to fix, change, or improve in these situations. The goal may have been to reduce costs, shorten cycle time, retain employees, avoid fines, or improve customer confidence. Whatever the reason, the actions were not arbitrary. These companies planned their actions and committed resources. What they may or may not have had was a process that helped them fully understand the consequences of their actions and measure the results. A BRIEF HISTORY OF INTERVENTIONS The term intervention has been traditionally used by members of the counseling profession to mean a purposeful confrontation to get individuals to accept responsibility for their actions and change their behavior. The term was adopted by professionals in training and development when Barry Booth and Odin Westgaard first used it at a national conference in 1979. The term soon appeared in professional journals, referring to solutions other than training (more specifically job aids) to improve performance. The term intervention is still the performance consultant’s word, not the language of our clients. Our clients do not talk about interventions. They talk about initiatives, programs, and strategies to solve problems, increase productivity, and reduce costs. The client’s intent is to accomplish a goal—for example: · Increase stockholder returns · Improve market position or share · Increase productivity · Improve product performance · Improve people performance · Improve financial performance · Achieve regulatory compliance In the late 1980s, I conducted a research project to identify what companies were doing to improve performance. It was this research that got me to think less about specific interventions and more about what stimulated or triggered the need for the change and thus the intent behind the change. I learned that companies implement changes in response to a combination of business need, poor productivity, poor employee morale, the availability of new technology, and social pressure. I also noticed the role that the popular press, and later the mass media, played in influencing the types of interventions management sponsored. That research has been helpful to me in a number of ways. I discovered that most interventions are initiated in response to a major event or real need. Some were implemented because of the influence of a strong, popular personality. Therefore, when I’m hired after the client has already decided on an intervention, I still want to identify what drove the decision. Was it the results of a needs assessment? The desire to take advantage of a new technology? Or did someone just want to join in on the managerial fad of the day? I can’t measure the effectiveness of a program unless I know the stimulus and the intent behind the particular solution. If the client has not decided on a course of action, I want to understand the problem well enough to recommend the appropriate solution. Here is a brief overview of some significant events and people who influenced the business world’s ideas about how to improve managerial and organizational effectiveness. My intent is to encourage all of us to question what affects performance and how best to improve it. Understanding why organizations chose certain interventions in the past will put us in a better position to recommend the same or a more appropriate intervention in the future. Big business as we know it came about during the early twentieth century. The relatively new oil, steel, railroad, and meatpacking industries had two problems: very high turnover and the need to coordinate the efforts of more people than they ever had had to deal with in the past. Organizations turned to the leading thinkers of the day. Management was impressed with the work of Frederick Taylor, a mechanical engineer who later became known as the father of scientific management. Taylor, along with Frank Gilbreth (who refined the use of time and motion studies) and his wife, Lillian Gilbreth (who earned a doctorate in psychology from Brown University), were studying how jobs and tasks were designed. Rather than focus on how to reduce turnover, they used time and motion studies to reduce jobs to a few discrete tasks so people could be trained in hours instead of days to do the work. (Task and job redesign remains a popular intervention today; however, the goal has gone beyond that of reducing training time to improving efficiency.) At about the same time, management theorists began to define the job of the supervisor versus that of the worker. Organizational theorists also began to propose ideas about how to structure, or organize, large businesses to improve efficiency. The concepts of vertical and horizontal integration were introduced, and they are still debated today. Vertical integration occurs when companies own or control everything in a supply chain, from raw material production, to manufacturing, to marketing and distributing finished products. An example is a cardboard box company that owns the forests, the lumber yard, the paper mills, the plant that manufactures the cartons, and the distribution centers that get them to stores that use them. Horizontal integration occurs when a company owns or controls the market in one segment of a supply chain (owning every forest or every paper mill, for example). The result of vertical and horizontal integration in the early twentieth century was the emergence of monopolies. Today we see organizations creating holding companies, franchises, and joint venture partners as ways to control markets. Increasing numbers of companies are outsourcing functions such as human resources, payroll, accounting services, and customer and technical service call centers. They are also outsourcing manufacturing, sales, and technical support to third-party after-market firms. Among those they outsource functions to are independent companies located in other countries in order to capitalize on lower labor costs, access to skilled workers, and proximity to emerging markets. Partially as a result of the practice of outsourcing, global organizations have become federations or conglomerates of separate but mutually dependent businesses engaged in all aspects of the supply chain, from supplying raw materials to after-market support. Organizations still wrestle with finding their optimum structure and size, particularly in response to the information and communication revolution, which has led to flattened organizations by shifting decision making to lower levels and outsourcing more functions. Advances in information and communication technologies have made much of traditional management philosophy, originally reforms in their own right, dysfunctional. And older management theories have not caught up with the idea of businesses as learning organizations; the older financial models are still wrestling with the concept of a knowledge economy or how businesses are making the transition to a service economy. Today CEOs of companies in the knowledge industry must understand how profoundly uninformative and misleading the balance sheet is. Restructuring and reorganizing are still commonly used interventions to solve business problems. It was about the time of the stock market crash of 1929 that organizations began to shift their attention to what motivates workers. There were riots in Washington, D.C., in 1932, sit-down strikes in Detroit in 1937, and unemployment ranging from 12 to 15 percent during the Great Depression. Elton Mayo conducted a landmark study from 1927 to 1932 at the Western Electric Company and concluded that workers respond to the total work situation and that attitudes toward work and their social relations are important. There was also increasing attention to the role of managers. Dale Carnegie’s book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, published in 1936, was outsold only by the Bible. Chester Barnard, an executive with American Telephone & Telegraph Company, wrote The Functions of the Executive, a leading book in 1938, on the role of management. He was the first to distinguish between effectiveness (goal accomplishment) and efficiency (without harmful consequences). He also stressed the role of management as the vehicle for communication, the conduit of ideas and information. The Hawthorne studies, done between 1927 and 1931, were published in 1939, the same year the plight of the migrant farmworker was popularized in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The threat of war in 1941 accelerated the search for better ways to increase productivity. The U.S. government, together with big business, launched the “training within industry” program. This program, created in anticipation of U.S. entry into World War II, was designed to address growing labor unrest by training supervisors in what was called pragmatic human relations. It was also designed to train civilian and military supervisors how to lead and motivate. The program was framed around two assumptions: that it takes a strong leader to motivate workers and that the most important skill is the ability to persuade. One hundred speech teachers were trained at Harvard University to teach the program. The primary text they used to train both military officers and civilians was Monroe’s Principles of Speech, which was published in 1935. This book was the primary text used to train military leaders until the mid 1950s. Every officer was subjected to Monroe’s “motivational sequence,” which combined traditional rhetoric with modern psychology. The belief that communication skills are key to leadership persists today. Technologies that were by-products of the war (such as mainframe computers in 1944 and transistors in 1948) would later profoundly alter how and where work is done. The introduction of direct-dial telephones in 1951 changed the way organizations communicated. At the same time, another technology was evolving that would shape the workplace of the future. This technology grew out of search for ways to change the physical workplace in order to improve productivity. The husband and wife team, Charles and Ray Eames, began their experiments with molded plywood in 1941. Synthetic fabrics, furniture, and flooring were developed in the 1940s and 1950s. Molded plywood and synthetics resulted in stackable, modular furniture. The concept of the “office house” premiered in 1943. Furniture systems and suspended ceilings were introduced in the 1950s. The rising cost of health care and new work-related injuries and illness such as carpal tunnel syndrome, lower back injuries, and increasing breathing disorders continues to force companies to experiment with new ways to design work space and equipment. The American with Disabilities Act of 1992 forced organizations to redesign facilities to allow greater access to all people. In 1997 the American Society of Interior Designers published a major study on how to improve productivity through better lighting, space layout, furniture design, and carpeting. Today organizations invest significant resources in designing work space and equipment in the hope of reducing costs and improving performance. The idea of lifelong learning gained momentum in the mid-1960s when junior colleges started to offer adult continuing education programs and professional societies offered professional development programs. The civil rights movement and the protests of the 1960s and 1970s fueled a more aggressive investment in managerial training and triggered the introduction of coaching and counseling in the workplace. The economic downturn in the early 1970s brought with it the realization that lifelong employment may not be possible. Companies introduced the first career counseling and preretirement planning programs in the early 1970s, signaling a shift in responsibility for job security from the organization to the individual. The twenty-first century continues to see health and fitness programs moving into the workplace, along with employee assistance programs. The space race started in the 1950s, and when it was announced on nationwide television that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had adopted zero defects as its standard, the business world began to pay more attention to standards. Japan began to establish itself as a dominant force in the automobile and electronic industries in the 1960s. The Baldrige Award was created in 1986 by President Reagan, and the ISO 9000 Standards were published that same year. Soon popular books about Total Quality Management (TQM) and reengineering increased our understanding of how standards, well-designed processes, measurement, teams, and leadership can affect performance. Today organizations are practicing the principles of 5S (sift, sort, simplify, standardize, systemize) and Six Sigma to reduce waste and improve work processes. Companies continue to experiment with many of these same ideas to improve performance. Especially with globalization increasing, companies are changing their structures, reengineering their processes, and using new technologies to redefine where work is done, introducing programs and incentives to motive workers, redesigning the workplace, and experimenting with theories about management and leadership. The programs that organizations implement to improve performance are done at many levels. Figure 8.1 lists examples of what organizations do at the individual, work group, department, division, and societal levels to improve performance. Figure 8.1 . Interventions at the Individual, Work Group, Department, and Division Levels Because performance consultants come out of HRD, organizational development, training, quality assurance, and other staff functions, they are more likely to get involved in interventions at the individual, work group, team, and department levels. Nevertheless, they may be part of a team working on a major initiative that can affect a whole division or company.  FIELD TOOLS: THE FAMILY OF INTERVENTIONS JOB AID I find it helpful to classify the different types of interventions in “families.” Otherwise the list of all the interventions that organizations could possibly implement would be long and unmanageable. I initially settled on thirteen families, but for this edition have expanded the list to fifteen, sorted into five groups. Each family of interventions has a unique label (see  Figure 8.2 ) that quickly communicates the purpose or reason for the intervention. The label tells you what a specific activity or program is supposed to accomplish. It helps me identify the appropriate action or set of actions to improve performance, stay focused on what I’m trying to accomplish, and not overlook supporting interventions. The labels do something else as well: they help me establish credibility because I have a method for sorting, comparing, and selecting the most appropriate intervention. I use  Figure 8.2  as a job aid and share it with clients. Figure 8.2 . The Families of Interventions FIELD TOOLS: THE IF-THEN TABLES FOR INTERVENTION The if-then tables for interventions shown in  Figures 8.3  through 8.8 are meant to be used more with your team than with your client. Use them to decide what to do, as a reminder of what you want to accomplish, and to help you think about what you will use as evidence of success.   Figure 8.3 . Interventions Job Aid: Information-Focused Interventions Information-Focused Interventions Interventions that belong in the first three families are about information (see  Figure 8.3 ). They are the most important group of interventions because: · They are valuable in their own right. They are frequently the only things you need to do to improve performance. · They support most, if not all, of the other interventions. · When they are not done well or are overlooked, they can greatly reduce the effectiveness of the other interventions and even cause them to fail. Interventions that fall in the first three families are more likely to draw on your interpersonal and facilitation skills. They require you to be politically savvy, remain impartial unless you have relevant information to share, stay focused so the group does not get off track, and challenge the assumptions of the group. Here are explanations and examples of interventions from the first three families that deal with information. Interventions That Define Interventions in this family are used to gain clarity. They are meant to contribute definition and dimension; help people find out what they agree or disagree about regarding their sphere of responsibility; where they are going as an individual, work group, or company; and what they are about, that is, their mission. Here are examples of this type of intervention: · Creating vision and mission statements that clarify a group’s purpose, goals, and expected deliverables · Developing team charters that clarify why a team was created, who its customer or sponsor is, what it is expected to accomplish, and when it is expected to accomplish it · Developing job descriptions that define responsibilities, roles, accountability, and so on · Developing documents of understanding with contractors and suppliers to ensure a shared understanding of expectations Recommend these types of activities when people are unsure, are in disagreement, or have different expectations because of dissimilar experiences, knowledge, or motives. Interventions That Inform Interventions in this family make sure that the people who need to know do know. It is not enough just to define the purpose, responsibilities, and other attributes; the information has to be communicated as well. Calling staff meetings, broadcasting employee announcements, and sending memos, faxes, and e-mails are examples of activities intended to inform. Recommend these types of activities when either the information has changed or the people have changed. Interventions That Document Interventions in this family make information continuously accessible. In many cases, it is not enough to communicate information just once. It is important that people be able to retrieve and reference information as they need it. Job aids, help screens, contracts, process flowcharts, procedural manuals, diagrams, and if-then tables are examples of interventions designed to make information retrievable and accessible. Recommend activities and programs of this type when information is complex and documentation can help reduce variance in performance. Your consulting and needs assessment processes should enable you to estimate the cost of getting, communicating, and codifying information and to compare that cost to the cost of doing nothing or something else. The operational definition worksheet ( Figure 1.7 ), the product portfolio worksheets ( Figures 2.3 ,  2.4 , and  2.5 ), and the process or task performance worksheet ( Figure 3.9 ) are tools for clarifying, gaining consensus, and helping make information available. Interventions That Reward The interventions in this family encourage and reward the behaviors and results that benefit the organization. Bonuses, merit increases, gifts and gift certificates, award banquets, plaques, tickets to major sports events, and dinners are examples of incentives designed to reward the behaviors and accomplishments the organization values. Recommend these types of activities and programs when current incentives reinforce the wrong behaviors or ignore desired ones. Interventions That Measure Interventions in this family compare actual behaviors or results to some identified standards, criteria, or expectations. Measuring emphasizes the organization’s commitment to meeting its expectations and goals. What organizations measure, when they measure, and the measurement criteria they use make public what the organization thinks is important. Measures tell people how the organization will weigh behaviors or results when it makes decisions about money, promotions, and resources; therefore, it is especially important that what is measured is not just what can be easily counted but what is meaningful. Examples of uses of measures and measuring include: · Signs that display expected call-handling times and flash actual average times · Reports that show the difference between planned and actual performance in such areas as turnover, cycle time, fixed costs to variable costs, percentage of yield, number of accidents that cause lost time, and sales · Capturing evidence of managers’ commitment to giving employees feedback and developing their capabilities through quarterly reports that show which managers did and did not conduct performance reviews and enroll people in developmental activities Recommend activities that measure when the information they provide will help people monitor their own performance or compare it against a standard. Interventions That Enforce Interventions in this family carry out the consequences. It is not enough to reward and measure; consequences, good and bad, need to be actualized if they are to be effective. Promises and threats produce cynicism when they are not made real. Some examples of this type of intervention are: · Recognizing employees who meet goals and withholding bonuses from those who do not · Celebrating supervisors whose crews worked accident free and holding them accountable for time lost to accidents Recommend that your client always enforce rules and standards, since compliance and achievement reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction, and ensure safety. Your consulting and needs assessment processes should enable you to determine the cost of interventions that reward, measure, and enforce the desired results and compare that cost to the potential gains. You can use the examples of standards and measures ( Figures 2.1  and  2.2 ) and the tools in Chapters Nine and Ten to facilitate discussion of and eventual agreement on what measures are appropriate.  FIELD NOTES: ENFORCING WORTHY MEASURES Kelly was asked to join a team charged with coming up with better incentives for the company’s insurance agents. Although the agents were meeting their goals, management thought the company’s cash flow could be improved. Also, an audit of the property and casualty line showed some major exposures for the company. Kelly and the team met with agents, finance, and sales to find out just what the problem was. They discovered that agents’ bonuses were based on the dollar volume of policies sold. Extra incentives were given during the fourth quarter of the fiscal year (the fiscal year ended in October). As a result, 60 percent of the business happened during the last quarter (August to October), 60 percent of that happened during the last month in the fourth quarter (October), and 60 percent of that happened during the last week of October. This sales pattern had a substantial effect on the company’s cash flow. There were other problems as well. Agents who sold property and casualty insurance were encouraged to sell as many policies as possible. This meant they would try to sell every home on the block and every small business in the mall. This was fine except when major disasters—tornados, fires, floods, and violent storms—occurred. Major disasters tend to damage every building on the block or in the mall, which results in significant losses for the company. Kelly and her team began to suspect that agents targeted their sales to customers whose policies expired during the fourth quarter and relied heavily on referrals for new business. Kelly and her team knew the way agents were compensated and rewarded partially contributed to the company’s cash flow and exposure problems. The team decided to recommend developing an incentive package that would reward agents for increasing the company’s cash flow by bringing in business throughout the year and turning down a certain percentage of business so the company’s overall risk was lessened. In addition, the incentive package should not punish agents when their fourth-quarter sales were down from past years. Because the ability to get new business depended on a policy’s expiration date, this would require either designing policies with nontraditional expiration dates or helping the agents identify potential customers with expiration dates throughout the year. Kelly and the team met with finance to determine the feasibility and cost implications of a package designed to help the agents change their approach so business would be less cyclical. Kelly’s solution incorporated defining and gaining agreement on the problem and criteria for a new incentive package and changing the incentive package so it better supported the needs of the company. Design-Focused Interventions The interventions that fall into the next three families are about design—specifically, the design of relationships, work, and physical things. Like the interventions that address consequences, these too should be performed after or in conjunction with those that deal with information. These interventions may require you to join with other experts such as industrial engineers and interior designers; however, your expertise in job and task analysis and the development of performance checklists will be uniquely valuable. If you do work with other experts, your skill in facilitation and keeping the group focused will come into play. Also, having some external status will help you establish credibility with the other experts. These interventions are summarized in  Figure 8.5 .   Figure 8.5 . Interventions Job Aid: Design-Focused Interventions Interventions That Organize Interventions in this family address the design of organizations, functions, duties, jobs, and tasks. Their goal is to provide a structure or sequence that enhances efficiency without sacrificing due diligence or safety. Examples of interventions that organize are outsourcing functions, decentralizing or centralizing functions, reengineering processes, redesigning jobs, and combining tasks. Recommend these types of interventions when the current structure is inefficient, results in redundancy, adds excess cost, overly burdens cycle time, or hides accountability. Interventions That Standardize Interventions in this family address the design of equipment, materials, procedures, and work space. Their goal is to achieve consistent performance, allow for interchangeability, or increase product flexibility and longevity. A common example is when manufacturers of different brands adopt industry standards that allow customers to interchange parts; in such cases, consumers can mix and mingle components from products built at different times. Another example is when standardization allows for automation; in this case, procedures and work protocols are standardized so that the same tasks can be automated. Examples of interventions that standardize include: · Requiring all production runs to produce the same volume of product · Using the same packaging sizes for multiple products · Requiring production workers to follow the same line setup procedures · Adopting standard labels and icons · Designing new technology to work with older technology · Applying the same formatting rules to documents and training materials · Using an automated answering system to handle customer calls · Installing process controllers to monitor and run production lines Recommend interventions that standardize when deviation adds extra costs, results in lower yields, or causes variance in the quality of work. Interventions That Redesign Interventions in this family address the design of physical things to enhance safety and reduce injury. Physical things include space, equipment, tools, and materials. These interventions call for changes in lighting, furnishing, fixtures, finishes, and fabrics and the reconfiguration of space, computer screens, and keyboards. Recommend interventions that redesign work space, equipment, tools, and materials when the current design results in non-value-adding activity or endangers people’s health and safety. Your processes should enable you to determine the cost of reorganizing, standardizing, and redesigning relationships, tasks, procedures, workplaces, or equipment and compare that cost to the anticipated gain. FIELD NOTES: REDESIGNING MANUALS AND WORK PROCEDURES Russ knew there had to be a better way for the CSRs to get information about different equipment models. He knew that the manuals were located too far from the CSRs’ call stations and that it was time-consuming to locate the specific information required to answer a customer’s question. He suggested putting together a small team of CSRs to identify ways to make the information more accessible. The team first identified the equipment and models most frequently asked about. Next, they created job aids with the information that CSRs needed to reference most frequently. The team also recommended standards for the manuals, specifically the use of icons, labels, and colors to help speed up the process of finding information. The team recommended as well a different set of procedures for the least-asked-about equipment and models. The new procedures allowed the CSRs to note the exception and offer to call the customer back after researching the question. They also recommended establishing a different standard call-handling time for questions about these models. Then the team compared the cost of handling the current number of callbacks with the cost of implementing these changes to see if the number of callbacks would go down enough to justify the change. Russ’s solution incorporated defining and getting agreement on the most used information, agreeing on a design, and creating a job aid (documenting what was agreed to) so the information was more easily retrievable, and agreeing on new work protocols. Interventions That Organize Interventions in this family address the design of organizations, functions, duties, jobs, and tasks. Their goal is to provide a structure or sequence that enhances efficiency without sacrificing due diligence or safety. Examples of interventions that organize are outsourcing functions, decentralizing or centralizing functions, reengineering processes, redesigning jobs, and combining tasks. Recommend these types of interventions when the current structure is inefficient, results in redundancy, adds excess cost, overly burdens cycle time, or hides accountability. Interventions That Standardize Interventions in this family address the design of equipment, materials, procedures, and work space. Their goal is to achieve consistent performance, allow for interchangeability, or increase product flexibility and longevity. A common example is when manufacturers of different brands adopt industry standards that allow customers to interchange parts; in such cases, consumers can mix and mingle components from products built at different times. Another example is when standardization allows for automation; in this case, procedures and work protocols are standardized so that the same tasks can be automated. Examples of interventions that standardize include: · Requiring all production runs to produce the same volume of product · Using the same packaging sizes for multiple products · Requiring production workers to follow the same line setup procedures · Adopting standard labels and icons · Designing new technology to work with older technology · Applying the same formatting rules to documents and training materials · Using an automated answering system to handle customer calls · Installing process controllers to monitor and run production lines Recommend interventions that standardize when deviation adds extra costs, results in lower yields, or causes variance in the quality of work. Interventions That Redesign Interventions in this family address the design of physical things to enhance safety and reduce injury. Physical things include space, equipment, tools, and materials. These interventions call for changes in lighting, furnishing, fixtures, finishes, and fabrics and the reconfiguration of space, computer screens, and keyboards. Recommend interventions that redesign work space, equipment, tools, and materials when the current design results in non-value-adding activity or endangers people’s health and safety. Your processes should enable you to determine the cost of reorganizing, standardizing, and redesigning relationships, tasks, procedures, workplaces, or equipment and compare that cost to the anticipated gain. FIELD NOTES: REDESIGNING MANUALS AND WORK PROCEDURES Russ knew there had to be a better way for the CSRs to get information about different equipment models. He knew that the manuals were located too far from the CSRs’ call stations and that it was time-consuming to locate the specific information required to answer a customer’s question. He suggested putting together a small team of CSRs to identify ways to make the information more accessible. The team first identified the equipment and models most frequently asked about. Next, they created job aids with the information that CSRs needed to reference most frequently. The team also recommended standards for the manuals, specifically the use of icons, labels, and colors to help speed up the process of finding information. The team recommended as well a different set of procedures for the least-asked-about equipment and models. The new procedures allowed the CSRs to note the exception and offer to call the customer back after researching the question. They also recommended establishing a different standard call-handling time for questions about these models. Then the team compared the cost of handling the current number of callbacks with the cost of implementing these changes to see if the number of callbacks would go down enough to justify the change. Russ’s solution incorporated defining and getting agreement on the most used information, agreeing on a design, and creating a job aid (documenting what was agreed to) so the information was more easily retrievable, and agreeing on new work protocols. Capacity- and Capability-Focused Interventions The next three interventions are about enhancing people’s capacities and capabilities (see  Figure 8.6 ). Just like the interventions that deal with consequences and design, these too must be performed after or in conjunction with those that focus on information. These interventions in particular require superior interpersonal skills and skill in creating dissonance and staying focused. Expertise in designing instructional programs may also be required   Figure 8.6 . Interventions Job Aid: Capacity- and Capability-Focused Interventions Interventions That Reframe Interventions in this family consist of events or messages that produce a new mental image for people. They are performed to help people look at problems in a new way, gain a new perspective, or redefine a situation so that they can solve their own problems. Reframing is done a lot but is rarely recognized as an intervention. Creating a new paradigm is an example of reframing. New paradigms help people let go of old ways of doing business. Turning a disadvantage into an advantage is another example. Board, electronic, and team games, that distort time, relationships, and location, or impose different social rules can be examples of reframing. Photographs and drawings done from an unusual vantage point enable people to see things in new ways. Organizations use reframing activities when they want to rechannel people’s energy toward new possibilities. Therapists use them when they want to help patients develop new mental models that support emotional growth and constructive relationships. Recommend these types of interventions when old attitudes and frames of reference prevent growth. Interventions That Counsel Interventions in this family help people deal with family, financial, career, and health issues. Some examples are employee assistance programs, on-site fitness centers, on-site day care services, smoking cessation programs, and preretirement and financial planning seminars. Recommend interventions from this family when people are preoccupied with personal and career issues that distract them, reduce productivity, and increase costs. Interventions That Develop Interventions in this family improve or expand people’s knowledge and skills. Examples are training programs, mentoring programs, job swapping, cross-functional teams, community college programs, continuing education courses, conferences, and seminars. Recommend interventions from this family when people’s lack of skills and knowledge adversely affect their current or future performance. Your consulting and needs assessment processes should help you determine the cost of increasing people’s capacity to perform and deal with personal and business issues and compare that cost to the anticipated gain.  FIELD NOTES: BUILDING COMMITMENT AND REFRAMING A RELATIONSHIP Mike returned from visiting the supplier’s plant. The dirty, rundown conditions he saw and poor employee morale indicated either that the company was misusing money or the owner was not sufficiently reinvesting in the company. Mike shared his observations about the supplier with his management, particularly about the condition of the plant, quality of the cafeteria, and operating budget. He recommended that before his company lent money to the supplier, it should reframe its relationship with the supplier. He recommended requiring the supplier to implement some specific performance goals: · Reinvest an agreed-on amount of money in the business. · Use the reinvestment to upgrade the plant and equipment. · Fund training for employees. · Do a morale survey to establish a baseline measure that can be used later to determine if improvement had occurred. · Agree to on-site visits. · Make quarterly progress reports. In exchange, Mike’s company would guarantee the supplier a minimum amount of business over the next five years. Mike also suggested that the two companies set product performance standards and financial performance goals. If the supplier did not meet those standards or goals within a specified amount of time, the supplier would lose the business. Mike recommended his company determine how much improvement the supplier must demonstrate, and by when, to make a loan worthwhile. Mike’s solution was a combination of defining new performance standards and making the consequences of not meeting those standards clear. Finally, he recommended a significant redefinition of his company’s relationship with the supplier that spelled out   expectations, measures, and accountability. The recommended changes were so significant that they constituted a reframing because they changed how both companies viewed their relationship. Action-Focused Interventions These interventions are about engaging in activities that stimulate or enable others to act (see  Figure 8.7 ). Similar to interventions that deal with capacity, capability, design, and consequences, these too should be performed after or in conjunction with those that focus on information. These interventions require superior skills in diplomacy, tact, and persuasion. An understanding of how to use group pressure, guilt, shame, and other psychological appeals is helpful.   Figure 8.7 . Interventions Job Aid: Action-Focused Interventions Interventions That Advocate Interventions in this family are designed to get individuals and groups to support goals by committing funds, resources, time, and the like. Maybe you’ve witnessed social groups appealing to elected leaders or public opinion through sit-ins, marches, advertisements, and blogs. Businesses, especially large, decentralized ones, find it difficult to get functional leaders to commit resources to major initiatives, such as committing to a standard technology or work procedure. The problem is especially difficult when the organization is a federation of firms that must work together as a collective to be competitive in the marketplace. The individual leaders may have different priorities, values, and perceived understandings of the need to act. The techniques that organizations use to get leaders and senior managers to act include: · The creation of user or customer councils where leaders have to respond to their stakeholders about emerging market needs and new demands · Reporting how leaders rank in comparison to their peers on specific variables like earnings compared to investment in development, safety records, and customer and employee retention · Participation in industry studies requiring participant organizations to reveal their practices, which are then compared to an industry standard or industry peer, and made public  FIELD NOTES: USING PEER PRESSURE AND APPEALING TO EGOS Carol knew that simply telling executives that the company needed better employee practices would not be enough. Telling them about the increased incidence of occupational suicides, job-related accidents, and job disability due to job stress was not enough either. She knew, though, that the executives were very competitive and status conscious and decided to devise a way to get them to report their progress on adopting a suite of behaviors they identified as necessary for reducing job stress. After briefing the executives on the economic impact of the increased deaths, accidents, and turnover tied directly to management practices, she persuaded them to identify and commit to a set of behaviors they believed would improve the situation. They then set personal goals for adopting those behaviors, committed to holding each other accountable, and agreed to report their progress at the regularly scheduled quarterly executive meetings. She also persuaded the president to set aside time on the agenda for this, increasing the odds that the executives would be prepared with their reports. Each executive was asked to report his percentage of goal accomplishment, and the results were put on a chart for everyone to see. Carol gambled that their egos would pressure them to make a serious attempt at meeting their commitments. Jeff was charged with improving the performance of field technicians who worked for independently owned dealerships throughout the world. His company could build the training, create the assessments necessary for certification, and even hold contests to reward those who achieved it, but the company had no authority over the technicians. His success depended on his ability to convince dealers to commit the funds required for technicians to participate in the training and certification. He began with an appeal to the more successful dealers, and together they decided to set up a dealer council to provide direction and set priorities on what products most needed training and certification. The plan was for the council to meet semiannually to discuss participation in the training and certification and compare it to key metrics on a scorecard such as technician productivity, customer satisfaction scores, and equipment utilization. Jeff and the dealers who devised the plan counted on peer pressure and the competitive nature of using a scorecard to get participation. Dealers in each market were asked to elect a representative. Within a short time, it was considered an honor to be elected to the council and participate in the training and certification. Jeff used the council to recognize dealers whose scores improved after participation in the training. He also used the council to recognize technicians who achieved certification. Interventions That Serve Interventions in this family are intended to provide resources to individuals and groups who might usually be capable of helping themselves but due to extenuating circumstance cannot. These types of interventions are usually done in response to political, economic, or environmental crises such as wars and natural disasters. Some examples are the tsunami that hit Sri Lanka, India, and neighboring countries; the earthquake in Pakistan; and Hurricane Katrina. Each left hundreds of thousands of people homeless. Other examples of service providers include Habitat for Humanity, which builds homes for the homeless, the Heifer Foundation, which gives people livestock along with training so they are self-sufficient, the Red Cross, which provides emergency food and shelter, and Doctors Without Borders, which sends doctors into war zones to provide medical help. Extenuating circumstances happen to businesses as well, necessitating employees to help in ways beyond their normal work. Some examples of these types of interventions at the organizational level include: · Loaning skilled workers to industry partners in response to a major disaster · Asking workers to supplement teams because of a shortage of skilled help due to an excessive demand for work as the result of a market demand or a natural disaster Your consulting and needs assessment processes should help you determine the effort required to encourage others to act and provide service.  FIELD NOTES: COMING TO THE RESCUE When the New Orleans airport was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, leadership from area airports met to decide how they could help. The Houston, Dulles, and Atlanta airports developed a disaster response plan and decided they would take turns sending equipment and skilled workers for ten to twenty days at a time to do whatever was necessary. As a result, the New Orleans airport was one of the first facilities restored to functionality after the hurricane. Congruency-Focused Interventions The last family of interventions is about congruency. Like the interventions that deal with consequences, design, capability, capacity, and action, these too are done after or in conjunction with those that precede it. Like the other interventions, you will use your expertise in assessment and measurement and your skill at facilitation (see  Figure 8.8 ).   Figure 8.8 . Interventions Job Aid: Congruency-Focused Interventions Interventions That Align Interventions in this family help ensure that an organization’s goals, practices, consequences, and resources are all supporting the same vision and mission. Sometimes programs that seem to be appropriate, on track, or working successfully may actually be counterproductive over time. The result could be wasted investment because programs are aborted or abandoned when the company realizes they drain resources, shift costs, or undermine other initiatives. An example is an intervention that is designed to promote the values of openness and honesty but is implemented in an environment that punishes people for being candid. Another example is work groups that claim to encourage critical debate to avoid mistakes but actually chastise people who offer criticism for not being team players. The result is that communication is accomplished through innuendo and the rumor mill. Recommend interventions that better align values and norms with goals when rhetoric and behavior do not support each other. Your processes should allow you to compare the cost of operating under conflicting goals, practices, and so on with the cost of bringing them into alignment.  FIELD NOTES: CERTIFICATION Russ and the team assigned to support the new product line at the medical manufacturer decided they wanted a program (an intervention) that improved the reliability of diagnostic equipment by ensuring field technicians were competent to install and service the equipment, and would earn customer confidence (the intervention’s measures of success). The team decided that if the company certified the field technicians (the specific intervention) they might accomplish both goals. Field technicians install and commission the equipment; they also do preventive maintenance and repairs. The equipment performs diagnostic tests for doctors. Because doctors use the results of these tests to prescribe treatments, the performance of the equipment is critical. The decision to develop a certification program put into motion a series of smaller yet supportive interventions. First the team had to do a job analysis (define the job and the criteria for judging proficiency). In the process, the team discovered wide variances in preventive maintenance practice across geographical zones. The team brought together engineers, zone directors, and technicians who shared their practices and agreed to a common set of procedures (standardization). To be certified, technicians would be required to demonstrate competence and consistent performance (based on established measures). The criteria used to judge competence and consistent performance were level of customer satisfaction (measured by ratings on customer satisfaction surveys), productivity (measured by noting the number of installations within a period of time, the efficiency of the installations, and the average time spent on the installation), troubleshooting skill (measured by using problem simulations), and adherence to procedures (measured by direct observation of the task at a client site). The technicians’ performance was documented and communicated informally to technicians and zone managers. Technicians had six months to meet the criteria. Those who did were given special recognition (a reward); those who did not were offered the opportunity for remediation (development) or placement in another job (enforcement). The team then looked at the training given to new employees. The training did not adequately explain customer expectations or provide practice in the procedures and troubleshooting. The team then recommended that the training be modified to match the criteria of the certification (alignment).  FIELD TECHNIQUES: USING THE INTER VENTIONS IF-THEN TABLES You can use the if-then tables ( Figures 8.3  through  8.8 ) to facilitate discussions about what other elements might be affected by implementing a major intervention. Use them to drive discussions about what else has to change for the intervention to work. The tables can help you evaluate an intervention after it has been implemented and identify why an intervention failed or met with resistance. Here are some guidelines for using tables: 1. Go over the table row by row. For each problem or “if” statement, ask if this describes your situation. If it does not, write your own problem statement, complete the “and” section, and then list what you think you should do. 2. If appropriate, discuss with your team what you want your solution to accomplish and how you might judge which actions are more likely to yield the greatest benefit. 3. Use the table with your team to identify the kinds of activities or programs that will help in your situation. 4. Identify what else has to change or be in place for your recommendations to be successful. 5. Identify how you will measure the effectiveness, cost benefit, or success of the intervention.  FIELD TOOLS: THE HIERARCHY-INTERVENTIONS MATRIX The matrix in  Figure 8.9  summarizes for you, your team, and your client, on one page, the relationship between the hierarchy and the interventions. The columns contain the elements of the hierarchy you examined during your needs assessment, and the rows are the families of interventions. Figure 8.9 . The Hierarchy-Interventions Matrix As the matrix shows, more than one intervention is almost always necessary to produce long-lasting results. Use the matrix to help you decide what needs to be done and in what order to do it. Here are some guidelines for using the matrix: 1. Compare what you decided would be the appropriate combination of interventions from the if-then table with what the matrix indicates. 2. Remember that performance problems are caused by a series of interdependent variables, not just one factor. 3. Because most performance problems are the result of a number of smaller breakdowns, the solutions must be done in combination if long-term change is your goal. 4. Discuss with your team how a single large intervention (like implementing new technology, reengineering a major process, or establishing a certification program) might accomplish most, if not all, of your goals. 5. Discuss what has to be done for your intervention to produce lasting results. 6. Decide what would be a reasonable course of action. 7. Decide who needs to be involved, in what ways they need to be involved, and when they need to be involved. 8. Define everyone’s roles and responsibilities. 9. Use this information to build a project plan for designing, implementing, and evaluating the intervention.  FIELD TECHNIQUES: ELIMINATING BARRIERS TO BECOMING A PERFORMANCE CONSULTANT To gain practice identifying the best combination of interventions, use the if-then tables to come up with an action plan to support your own transition—for example: 1. Information-focused intervention · Define performance consulting. What will you do to gain agreement and understanding among your colleagues and clients as to what performance consulting is and how it will be done in your organization? · Inform others of your intent and services. How will you communicate your vision and mission to staff, clients, and colleagues? Will you develop a flowchart like Mike’s ( Figure 1.10 ) or use something else to document your vision, mission, goals, and processes? 2. Consequence-focused intervention · Consequences. What are the consequences of your success or failure? · Measure results. Will you measure your performance in terms of how efficient and effective your processes are, how satisfied your customers are, or your ability to measure your results? Will you use the kinds of measures Mike wants to use ( Figure 2.2 ) or something else? 3. Design-focused intervention · How have you decided how to organize your department or your projects? · What standard procedures and processes will you adopt? · Will you redesign any elements of your work space or equipment to support the new role? 4. Capacity- and capabilities-focused intervention · Would reframing your new role help your clients understand it and be better able to work with you in new ways? · Do you or any of your colleagues want additional development or training? If so, what would be the topic or skill? Do you think development would be valuable? 5. Action-focused intervention · Whose commitment do you need? How will you get it? · Are there opportunities to provide service that would allow you an opportunity to build credibility? 6. Congruence-focused intervention · How will you align your vision, mission, processes, measures, and practices so that all your resources are concentrated on the same goal? SUMMARY Organizations are always going to do things to shape human performance and improve business results. They can do it with or without a process. As a performance consultant, you offer them a process that allows them to set measures, identify resources, identify barriers, and take control. You can use that same process to help them fully understand the implications of their actions and be successful.