Human Resources 8: Enhancing Employee Productivity & Performance

This continues our series on human resource issues that can improve your business. I wish to acknowledge Lori Wadsworth’s conceptual and intellectual contribution to these posts.

Our last post outlined a restrictive and possibly intrusive approach to employee relations. We discussed potential consequences of negative relations. Today we will focus on more positive and nurturing employee relations. We will explore improvements in productivity that may follow nourishing employee relations.

Employee Relations that Enhance the Relationships

Dr. Wadsworth describes three types of culture a business may choose to employ:

• A culture of fear: the business motivates employees by fear of reprisal
• Entitlement culture: employees assume they are entitled to work and benefits
• Revitalization culture: where management and employees revitalize the effort

I liken these cultures to Dr. Lewin’s analysis of leadership styles:

• Autocratic styles tend to develop a culture of fear
• Participative or democratic styles tend to develop cultures of revitalization
• Delegative or Laissez-Faire styles tend to develop cultures of entitlement

You may take the quiz linked above to discover your natural style. The best leadership incorporates a little of each of the three styles with an emphasis on participative.

Involve Your Employees in Collaborative Employee Relations

Smaller companies may involve employees more effectively than large ones. The owner or general manager knows a greater a percentage of workers, and interfaces with them more closely. Closer contact allows supervisors to recognize intrinsic (internal) or extrinsic (external) motivations—and reward employees appropriately .

I believe positive relations enhance performance better than restrictive or punitive relations. Positive relations grow when you involve employees in decision making processes. Lewin indicated that while you need to include all three traits, performance increases most when the participative style remains the dominant one.

National Performance Reviews’ Quality Management

The National Performance Review identify three barriers to productivity:

• insufficient supervisor control
• communication
• planning

In addition, quality management improves when you:

• Cut red tape
• Put clients first
• Empower employees to get results
• Cut back to the basics

Small-businesses can act to resolve all of seven issues.

Saturday we will examine human resource functions involving discipline and termination