Do You Know Your Business is Driven by a People Engine?

Recently I cleaned a mouse. It was driving me crazy with its unpredictable and skittish movements. So I turned off my computer, removed the trackball and its cover, and began to delicately remove the lint and dust from the rollers. Then I got out some cleaner and made the outside surface look like new. While working on the mouse, I told myself it should be a part of my routine computer maintenance. After all, the antivirus update happens every week, the current project files backup happens daily, and the general system maintenance is also a weekly event. So cleaning the mouse belongs on that list. It's an integral part of the system. Small, but crucial, the system would be all but unusable without it. The people engine of your business deserves the same sort of dedicated maintenance schedule. After all, it's a complex system and should be treated like one.

What, exactly, is this people engine? First off, like any engine, it's an assembly of systems designed to work together for a single purpose. The systems in your people engine are: 

• Recruiting, selection, and hiring practices

• Employees

• Training, work standards, and reinforcement practices

• Job assignments, work flow, and productivity monitoring

• Motivation, compensation, and reward practices

Each is a specialized part of the whole, and together they function to do the work of your business. Seems to me, that's as much like an engine as anything else.

So how do you treat your people engine like a complex system? You begin by recognizing that, like any complex system, owning and operating a people engine happens in phases. These phases are:

• Design

• Operation

• Maintenance

• Troubleshooting

• Repair

Let's consider a few things you could be doing to make sure that you're handling each phase in the best way. 

Design. Every design (whether it's for a new engine, a new vehicle, or a new house) begins with questions like these: what does this new thing have to do, what will its operating conditions be, what constraints will it face, and how will we know when the design is successful? For your people engine, you want to make sure that each of the component systems (see the list above, starting with recruiting, selection and hiring) fits together with the others. Are you recruiting the right people? Are your work standards in a form that's appropriate for your employees? Is the training set up to allow new hires to learn their jobs quickly without major interruptions to the work flow? Does your compensation system appeal to the type of employee you want to keep? 

Operation. Do your work standards and practices provide for smooth interactions with your customers? Is each job satisfying in itself? Does the workflow result in efficient work delivered in a timely way to your customers? Do you regularly monitor productivity and reward people for good results while helping others bring their productivity up to standard? Do your customers compliment you on the way your shop or store is run? 

Maintenance. How often do you check to see if the people engine is running up to specification? Are you still getting high quality job applicants? Do you look at productivity figures on a regular basis? What do you measure besides profit and loss? How often do you check to ensure that your employees are keeping up with their ongoing training and development? How often do you examine your payroll to see how well your motivation and rewards system is producing the results you want? When was the last time you conducted an exit interview with an employee who decided to leave to work someplace else? 

Troubleshooting. How do you face problems with productivity or morale? Do you take a systematic approach or do you fire from the hip? Even when you have a solid hunch why productivity is down or turnover is increasing, do you still take a good look at every system in the people engine before you decide how to solve your problem? Do you consider multiple possible causes before you act on the most likely cause of the problem? 

Repair. Do you make repairs to the people engine with care, patience, and clean hands? If you need to make a major change in your work practices, do you prepare your employees in advance and then guide them through the change in a supportive way? If you decide to make a series of changes, do you make one change first and then check the results of that change before going on to the next one? Do you clean up your tools when you're done: do you make the needed revisions to your employee handbook, work standards, and training materials to reflect the changes you just made to the system?

This is by no means an exhaustive list and you will probably see more ways to treat your business like an engine of interrelated systems. Just as the ignition system must fire at the right time, and the fuel system must deliver the right air-fuel mixture, the people engine of your business will put out the highest possible productivity when all the systems are working right.

So, is it tune-up time in your business? Or do you manage like the car owner who changes his oil every 100,000 miles whether he needs to or not?

You decide.

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