Resource Management Warning Flag 3 – Marginalizing Employee Contributions
All employees need to feel their work contributes to and is valued by the organization. While leaders may express appreciation for an individual or group’s work effort, resource management programs sometimes unintentionally marginalize employee contributions. Doing so causes employee dissatisfaction, burnout, and unwanted attrition. Resource management and strategic planning programs must therefore be carefully constructed so as to not unintentionally marginalize employee effort.[wcm_restrict plans=”40849, 25542, 25653″]
Marginalization of employee effort can appear in many forms outside of direct employee contact. Such occurrences often go unnoticed until after the realization of reduced productivity and/or elevated attrition. Worse, long-term marginalization may result in chronic performance deficits that go unnoticed and therefore uncorrected; robbing the organization of no-cost productivity and an improved bottom line. While not all inclusive, the following lists, Process-Based Warning Flags, Process Execution Warning Flags – Behaviors, Potential, Observable Results, and Potential Causes, can be used to help leaders identify unintended employee contribution marginalization mechanisms prior to adverse consequence realization. Only after a problem is recognized and its causes identified can the needed action be taken to move the organization toward improved performance.
Process-Based Warning Flags
- Strategic planning processes assumes a per employee discretionary effort level beyond acceptable norms, typically 45 hours worked per week by salaried professionals (5 hours of discretionary effort)
- Established performance standards demand longer than 9 hour work days without offsetting compensation
- Uncompensated programmatic demands of employee time during weekends, holidays, and after normal/scheduled business hours
- Employee performance evaluation programs do not actively seek to identify, recognize, and reward discretionary effort beyond acceptable norms
- Employee performance evaluation programs fail to acknowledge work activities not directly contributing to revenue generation (such as work related travel)
Process Execution Warning Flags – Behaviors
- Executives, managers, and supervisors communicate unwritten, uncompensated, longer than normal work hours expectations
- Managers discount work related travel demands placed on employees
- Managers penalize employees experiencing high travel hours for their otherwise lower contributions to revenue generating activities
- Managers discount remote work – at home work performed by normally in-office employees and out-of-office work performed by remote workers
- Executives, managers, and supervisors deliberately observe the arrival and departure of their subordinates’ cars as a basis for performance assessment
- Managers fail to disclose beyond normal discretionary effort contribution expectations and/or travel requirements during the internal or external hiring process
Potential, Observable Results
- Reduced productivity
- Increase in performance errors and product/service quality defects
- Diminished employee creativity contribution
- Rise in employee dissatisfaction and increased resistance to the provision of discretionary effort
- Elevated unwanted attrition, particularly among top performers
Potential Causes
- Executives, managers, and supervisors feel discretionary effort is a part of an employee’s ‘paying’ his/her dues to the organization
- Managers don’t value work they cannot or do not directly observe
- Managers discount effort not directly contributing to the bottom line (such as travel)
- Executives, managers, and supervisors fail to recognize that compensation includes number of hours worked (work-life balance) and that employees will become dissatisfied and attrite when this component of compensation becomes too out-of-balance
- Managers failure to recognize any work related activity the employee performs that would otherwise not be done for personal benefit and by choice is a contribution to the employer (outside of the normal transit to and from the workplace for in-office workers though such transits are work contributions for remote workers)
- Executives, managers, and supervisors’ unending desire to do more with less leading them to drive their subordinates to work ever increasing numbers of hours beyond that normally acceptable
Final Thoughts…
The caution to not marginalize employee effort assumes the employee’s work productively contributes to the organization’s mission goal achievement and is consistent with the expectations framed by the organization’s value system. Managers must act to eliminate effort spent on non-value adding activities and behaviors that are inconsistent with the organization’s values. Such corrections should not be deemed as marginalizing an employee’s efforts but rather as redirecting their efforts to more constructive work.
It is important to recognize that employee effort can be marginalized outside of the resource management program. In particular, a manager’s individual leadership style and resulting behaviors may marginalize an employee’s contributions. Taking employee’s business related efforts for granted in this manner should also be avoided.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember plans=”40849, 25542, 25653″]
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About the Author
Nathan Ives is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.
Jeffrey Gitomer is the author of The Sales Bible, Customer Satisfaction is Worthless Customer Loyalty is Priceless, The Little Red Book of Selling, The Little Red Book of Sales Answers, The Little Black Book of Connections, The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude, The Little Green Book of Getting Your Way, The Little Platinum Book of Cha-Ching, The Little Teal Book of Trust, The Little Book of Leadership, and Social BOOM! His website, 
StrategyDriven Professional Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques business professionals can use to accelerate their careers and personal goals achievement. These podcasts elaborate on the principle, best practice, and warning flag articles found on the StrategyDriven Professional website.
Rommin Adl is Executive Vice President and Global Partner at BTS USA, a leader in the development and delivery of high-impact experiential learning initiatives that drive alignment, mindset, and capability around strategic priorities. For over twenty years, Rommin has advised leaders at companies including Aetna, AT&T, GlaxoSmithKline, Honeywell, Humana, Time Warner, and many others on issues of strategy development and implementation.
StrategyDriven Enterprises, LLC and NTE Solutions have announced a partnership that will expand energy services to clients and prospects of both companies. The relationship combines StrategyDriven’s leading experience in asset lifecycle management and regulatory services with NTE Solutions’ capabilities in all aspects of power development, from engineering to commercialization. 
Organizational performance measurement systems are complex structures cascading vertically from the executive suite to the shop floor and stretching horizontally though many different functional workgroups. Consequently, the design of a performance measurement system takes on a high degree of complexity because of the numerous interrelationships between various organizational levels and workgroups and the cross-functional sharing of common metrics. Thus, it is important to employ a multidiscipline team to design the measurement system, one that includes representatives from all levels of the organization as well as each functional area.[wcm_restrict plans=”41647, 25542, 25653″]