Más Información
In the current world situation, where empires are made sometimes starting with the less apparent great ideas - taking facebook as an example -, sometimes the most important resource of business is the most overlooked.
Employees, as it turns out, are more often treated as another resource able to be exploited and not as people by most business hierarchies, but that situation is beginning to change as it is becoming clear that a different view on the subject can only be good for both entrepreneurs and workers.
"This is less about industry and more about leadership," expressed Dr. Jim Harter in an interview with EL UNIVERSAL.
Harter, Ph.D., is Chief Scientist of Workplace Management and Well-Being for Gallup’s workplace management practice. He is a best-selling author and the primary researcher and author of the first large-scale, multi-organization study to investigate the relationships between work-unit employee engagement and business results.
"We work with a number or organizations that are very hierarchical and establishing high levels of engagement is still very, very possible and managers are thinking into ways to encourage workers to be more productive. People come to work willing to make a difference, willing to develop.
"So, you can exist in a very hierarchical structure and yet be able to teach managers how to set clear expectations and goals, and how to encourage the development of individuals," expressed Harter.
"In new performance management we are more focused on individual differences and helping people to develop them. The failure in past performance systems was that people became engaged in their work without aiming for a higher performance," he added.
The whole concept of allowing people to develop their strengths or talents has been taking the world by storm in recent years, albeit it is not something exactly new.
"We kind of started the engagement industry back in the late 90s and it really picked up properly in the last ten years. It's probably two time periods: the engagement work in the last ten years and the strengths work in the last year," added Harter.
This change of view can be applied to any sort of business and industry, in regards of the apparent difficulties in doing so.
"I think every industry has their own challenges ... It is possible that any type of organization that has outdated leadership can work effectively into changing its culture," whether we are talking about the private or government sectors.
"Large companies just by nature present more challenges because of their complexities," he said, while pointing out that in "really small organizations we find higher levels of engagement, probably because their smaller grip of people and how easy they get people aligned on the same principles," he added.
In any case, the greatest mistake within a business, corporation or organization ranks is "to assume that all people are the same. Science has evolved".
