There is an urge to have innovative employees in the workplace as organizations need to continuously innovate. Organizations place great emphasis on their employees’ creative abilities and their role in the workplace. Therefore, they need to fully understand the term “Innovative Employees” as well as the factors that influence them (individual, organizational, job, and team levels factors). It is recommended to analyze those before taking any management decisions that could cost lots of money, such as training the current employees or hiring new ones.
Definition of innovative employees
Diehl & Seeck (2008) defined employee innovativeness as an “engagement in innovative behaviours, which includes behaviours related to the innovation process, i.e. idea generation, idea promotion and idea realization with the aim of producing innovations”. Innovation can be categorized either as incremental or radical and as either technological or administrative. As a result, innovative employees can be assessed throughout the innovation process, starting from the ideation phase to the implementation phase and the commercialization of products/services (or the implementation of new processes or structures within the organization).
When talking about innovation, it is essential to point out that there is a difference between creative employees and innovative employees, especially as several organizations use both terms interchangeably. As explained by Diehl & Seeck (2008), creativity is more concerned with the huge production of ideas (idea generation stage) only while innovation is related to the successful implementation of those ideas. Consequently, creativity doesn’t necessarily result in innovation but innovation will definitely need creativity.
Factors influencing innovative employees
There are four levels of factors that influence innovative employees: Individual, Job, Team, and Organizational level factors.
Individual
This includes abilities such as above-average skills, knowledge and general intellect, and domain or task-specific skills that show the employees’ educational level, training, expertise, and knowledge relevant to the job; and personality characteristics (Diehl & Seeck, 2008). The personality characteristics involve openness to new experiences, independence of judgment, a firm sense of self as creative, and self-confidence. Those factors have been revealed to lead to some employees being more creative than others. Flexibility and taking risks (the ability to try and accept failure) have also been shown to be related to creativity and innovation (Diehl & Seeck, 2008).
Organizations require abilities, skills, and personality characteristics such as networking, new technology, languages, cultural sensitivity, ethical behavior, learning skills, reflective skills, flexibility, entrepreneurship, problem-solving, and reliability. Those skills could be investigated during the hiring process, however, others can’t be really detected unless tested on the job. And in this latter case comes the role of the organization by encouraging and developing an environment that supports innovation, for example, offering training in innovation-related skills (Diehl & Seeck, 2008). Similarly, Sameer & Ohly (2017) highlighted that personality factors such as proactivity, self-confidence and originality, motivation, and cognitive ability impact individual innovation.
All of the previously mentioned factors should be considered by organizations whether they recruit or train their candidates for innovation. Asking the candidates to take some personality tests during the hiring phase could give the recruiters a good hint of the candidates’ personalities. This can help them identify the right training that a potential hire may need.
Job
Those factors involve the ones related to the contextual characteristics of the individual’s everyday job. The jobs’ tasks and projects have an impact on the extent to the employees will be involved in innovative work behaviors. In other words, the way the employees’ jobs are structured impacts their motivation; in turn, this influences their innovation tasks engagement (Diehl & Seeck, 2008).
Various job characteristics impact employee innovativeness, such as a high level of autonomy, non-routine tasks, and sufficient material resources (such as time to execute innovative tasks/jobs) (Diehl & Seeck, 2008). Organizations should analyze their jobs carefully and identify the workload of each to allow room for innovation; otherwise, employees will be concerned only with finishing their daily tasks. Allowing sufficient time and resources for innovation are vital elements for innovation, however, employees need to feel that innovation is among their priorities to perform it with the same level of energy as they perform their daily tasks.
Team
Team tasks, context, and team characteristics are proven to impact innovativeness (Diehl & Seeck, 2008; Sameer & Ohly 2017). For instance, team composition has proven to influence employee innovativeness. In other words, deep-level diversity within a team means diversity in skills, knowledge, experiences, etc. This will help in having a pool of ideas with different perspectives. Other team-level factors encompass a team’s level of agreement and cohesiveness as well, which have a great influence on innovation (Diehl & Seeck, 2008).
Personality tests are important in identifying and understanding the personality of each employee. Those tests will give insights on which team members should be working together, as we do not want to end up with team conflicts and disputes instead of innovative ideas. It is also recommended to always have a diverse team from different departments such as marketing and finance. This will allow them to have different perspectives in one team instead of having only the point of view of the production or R&D.
Organizational
Organizational level factors are a bit complicated as they include several elements such as the individual characteristics of the CEO, the organization’s size, and market share. Corporate and innovation strategies, organizational structure, and culture are core factors for innovation (Diehl & Seeck, 2008; Sameer & Ohly 2017). Innovation strategy is an important factor as it creates a roadmap for innovation.
There is no definitive type of structure for the organizational structure that is proven to be the most appropriate for innovation. However, it is believed that the organic structures — such as the matrix structure and the venture structure described by lack of hierarchies, low levels of bureaucracy, a wide span of control, flexibility, and adaptability — are favored for innovation (Diehl & Seeck, 2008). Finally, organizational culture is an essential component for an innovative environment. A clear mission statement (highlighting the value of innovation and internal entrepreneurship), high autonomy, tolerance of mistakes, continuous learning, and low bureaucracy are some of the most dominant elements of innovative culture.
Creating a culture with a climate for psychological safety, service, and initiative at the team or organizational level is crucial. Teams need to feel that they can take risks without having to feel fear towards negative results on their self-image, status, or career. This can happen through: low risk in showing ideas, higher level of job involvement, and better learning experience (Diehl & Seeck, 2008).
Lukes & Stephan (2017) has identified three main factors that influence employee innovativeness: managers, features of the organization, and wider national culture. For the managers’ role, leader/manager support is crucial for innovation; employees need to feel that their supervisors provide support to new and innovative ideas. One well-known and vital mechanism of showing a leaders’ support is leader-member exchange.
Ul ain Aslam, Ali, & Choudhary (2020) explained that leadership, creativity, and innovation have a positive relationship with each other. Leader-member exchange theory (LMX) recommends that leaders maintain different levels or quality of relationships with their employees. Leaders become more efficient when they create a healthy relationship with their followers which can be achieved through transactional and transformational leadership styles.
To sum up, all of the previously mentioned factors should be considered when organizations consider innovation. It is not just about spending a large amount of money on training your employees or providing them with workshops. It is about having the right building blocks for your innovation capability and revising them every now and then.
The value of Big Data has found its way to the core of many organizations.NewVantage Partners’ 2021 executive survey showed that 99.0% of the companies they surveyed are investing in data initiatives while 96.0% attest that Big Data and AI efforts were generating results.
However, working with Big Data is not easy for all companies. The survey revealed that 92.2% of leading companies consider culture (people, process, organization, and change management) as the top reason why becoming a data-driven organization remains challenging.
Organizations should recognize that integrating Big Data into performance management would allow them to further improve their performance , make strategic decisions, and achieve higher efficiency in many areas of business.
How does that happen? First, it is important to know what Big Data is and what it is not.
Big Data is not about having a higher volume of data. IBM defines Big Data as “a way of harvesting raw data from multiple, disparate data sources, storing the data for use by analytics programs, and using the raw data to derive value (meaning) from the data in a whole new way.”
Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier, authors of “Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think,” wrote that Big Data can generate new insights and develop new forms of value in a manner that changes how people live.
The reason is that Big Data can reveal trends and patterns. In an ever-changing business landscape, organizations working with Big Data would allow them to make decisions based on facts. This echoes what Geoffrey Moore, a famous American organizational theorist & author of “Crossing the Chasm,” was quoted saying: “Without big data analytics, companies are blind and deaf, wandering out onto the web like deer on a freeway.”
Big Data’s Role in Performance Management and Measurement
The value of Big Data lies in improving the performance and processes of an organization.
For instance, Big Data can provide insights into customer preferences. Understanding customer preferences and using them as a basis for strategies can lead to increased sales. With better forecasting, Big Data can guide companies in determining where they need to invest. A manufacturing company would be able to accurately identify the equipment that needs replacing. Moreover, the automation of high-level business processes can make organizations more effective and efficient.
In the conference paper, “Is Big Data the Next Big Thing in Performance Measurement Systems?” the authors concluded that the presence of a variety of data could expand the horizons of PMSs due to the application of different kinds of metrics. The applications of Big Data in PMS are in planning, controlling, and improving business performance as well as in strategic planning, controlling operations, and processes improvement.
The authors found the reasons for using Big Data and PMSs similar, and they revolve around decision-making and action-taking. “PMS supports decision-making [by] providing meaningful and appropriate data [developed] through a series of activities, such as analyzing and interpreting data from past actions to influence the future performance.”
Big Data in Action
The success ofNetflix, a streaming service company, is attributed to their usage of Big Data. For content development, their objective is to determine what their audience would want to watch next. To analyze the behavior and preferences of their over 140 million subscribers, Netflix used metrics, such as “What day you watch content,” “Searches on the platform,” “User location data,” “When you leave content,” “The ratings given by the users,” and even “Browsing and scrolling behavior.”
Netflix also uses Big Data in addressing challenges in production planning, such as determining shoot locations and arranging a shoot schedule. With prediction models, Netflix can minimize their efforts and reduce their expenses.
Xerox, the world’s largest provider of digital document solutions, once faced a problem with its workforce and needed to cut employee training costs and lower the premature attrition of its employee pool. With the help of Big Data, the company executed a predictive recruiting program in order to assess and filter applicants. Big Data and Big Data analytics helped them recruit people who have more technical skills and are more likely to stay longer with them. This means lower cost of training. The reduced attrition successfully helped the enhancement of Xerox’s bottom line.
Big data is a new source of competitive edge for any organization as it permits them to provide faster and more intelligent decisions, makes information more transparent, generates unprecedented insights into market situations and customer behavior, and optimizes business performance.
If you would like to discover new knowledge and the practical application of best practices used in analyzing statistical data, sign up for The KPI Institute’s Data Analysis Certification.
The last decade has brought a lot of changes to what is expected from the Human Resources function and an accelerated evolution to what is called the “new generation” HR. Few companies today remain unaware that HR can no longer exist as a support function and even the much-cited “earning a seat at the (executive) table” is getting history, as it becomes clearer every day that excellent HR is more about “owning” that table.
Both HR professionals and business leaders need to understand that HR is about a set of results, not about HR. What the business requires from HR is to build a set of integrated solutions, move away from the traditional role of executing HR processes, and use these processes and solutions to accelerate business and create a competitive advantage.
To achieve this shift from activities to business-relevant outcomesandcreate a more agile organization in the process, the HR organization needs to:
encourage new ways of working,
learn to collaborate cross-functionally and respond faster to changing business priorities,
tap the potential of new technologies and
leverage advanced data analytics to give relevant insight and inform business decisions.
Getting data-driven starts with getting data ready. With an enlarged focus on driving higher productivity, as well as engagement, the HR new function must look beyond basic employee metrics to harness nuanced insights on individual working preferences, career goals, and turnover risk. With latent talent shortages and highly dynamic markets, the HR organization must also focus on continuous reconfiguration to stay current with the marketplace.
In the HR professional’s new role, business literacy and quantitative acumen will become even more important. They will need to collaborate closer and more frequently with Operations and Finance peers, interpret the HR data analytics side-by-side with data from these groups, and contribute with data-driven insights. A data-driven HR function that can make fact-based decisions, predict workforce trends, and flag areas of concern is critical to creating a people-first organization that aligns with employee needs. Thus become not only another stakeholder at “the table”, but provide leaders that are key strategists and decision-makersin a world of work that truly demands their knowledge and insights.
What is the problem then?
The people analytics revolution has been discussed for a decade now, expecting it to bring us in a new era for HR. But so far, the revolution is for an elite few, not for the masses. Too many companies say they still need help with putting basic people analytics into practice while too many HR departments are still stuck struggling with the basics.
The most cited reasons for this situation include:
HR has more data than ever before but lacks knowledge on what to measure or what to do with the data
Poor data governance entails dealing with excessive, unintegrated, unreliable data
Analytic capability to turn data into insight is insufficiently developed within the HR teams
Cloud solutions and cutting-edge technology to enable streamlined and automated HR processes are expensive
Hopefully, this is about to change as 73% of companies declare that improving people analytics will be a major priority for the next five years. Some changes are already in sight, including:
A new profile of the HR professional is emerging and a brand new set of competencies are required, as shown by research led by LinkedIn that indicates a significant increase in HR professionals with data analysis competencies.
Over the last five years, the research showed a 242% increase in HR professionals with data analysis skills.
Companies have realized that starting small is ok. Value is added right away by combining reliable data with metrics that matter, while also preparing HR for advanced analytics in the future. The experience of these companies give us some insight on where to start:
a data plan should start with identifying metrics that matter to produce a report or dashboard that actually fits the intended purpose of tracking progress toward an objective, a critical workforce trend, or to inform a specific workforce decision.
reports and dashboards should be less ambitious and more focused on the most important talent issues, so the number of metrics should be limited to 20 wherever possible. Small, easy to understand dashboards that drive action can produce a big impact.
Fulfilling the promise of the Data Driven HR is not easy and the challenges are real. Embrace it as being the unavoidable future and accept that more often than not the biggest obstacles are not of a technical nature, but cultural. And the main one is the way HR still regards itself as being a non-business function, while all success stories prove that HR excellence starts and ends with a deep understanding of business.
The COVID-19 pandemic has left a strong mark in all aspects of our lives. It has impacted society – our habits, routines, and the way we interact. It has pressured the economy, its financial stability, and the way we do business.
Thus, what has changed in the way managers are doing performance management in these volatile times?
1. The way we do strategic planning
Before the pandemic, risk management, scenario planning, and business continuity plans were specific to large corporations. Nowadays, even small organizations will have a plan B ready for different scenarios of the COVID-19 evolution. There are industries, like retail, where all planning revolves around foresting based on historical data. Nowadays, using data from the past to plan the future seems a futile attempt to regain the feeling of control.
Moreover, most organizations, regardless of their industry, rely on annual if not 3 to 5 years planning. It is obvious that in the present circumstances and given the complexity of managing a business nowadays, these strategic planning practices seem useless.
2. The importance given to performance measurement
More than ever before, real-time data is a vital management tool. Access to data is critical in managing a crisis. One of the positive side effects of the pandemic was the pressure to digitize operations that create opportunities for data collection and better measurement of operations.
3. The way employees can be evaluated
Remote work and hybrid systems (combining work from home with office time) are no novelty, but in the COVID-19 circumstances, they gained significant recognition and became the norm rather than the exception for many organizations.
Managers and team leaders can no longer directly observe employees. There is a series of soft competencies, like communication, collaboration, proactivity, and creativity that are very difficult to evaluate in an online working environment, and yet they are essential skills for many jobs.
What is the way forward?
1. A different way of planning
Risk management must be an inherent part of organizational strategy, regardless of the company size. You don’t need a risk management office to have a proactive management approach and handle risks well. Small organizations can use their performance scorecard and populate it with leading KPIs or Key Risk Indicators.
For example, setting a red line level for # Days in accounts receivable can help you manage better cash flow, monitoring # Safety non-compliances can provide insights into the risk exposure to # Work accidents resulting in mortality. Identifying different scenarios in key areas of business and having contingency plans can give any organization a heads-up in case of a crisis.
Strategic planning must concentrate on shorter time horizons and reassess a series of factors that organizations may not have considered on a quarterly basis.
Government interventions, international economic context, competitors’ reactions, customers’ preferences, customers buying power, suppliers’ situations, internal capabilities and optimization potential, and employees morale and productivity are factors that have changed post-pandemic and need to be investigated. Moreover, agile strategic planning processes must be set in place to enable the organizations to react fast to changes.
In the face of chaos, the most effective tool to put everyone on the same page is to use clear objectives, KPIs, and initiatives, even short-term ones. The challenge is to adapt the measuring and reporting of performance to respond to tight deadlines. Data must be available fast, preferably in real time.
Thus, identify five to 10 KPIs that are easy to use, concise (tackle the problem directly), and can be collected with high frequency (weekly, monthly). These will be the ones that help you navigate a crisis. Now is the time to replace complex measurements and reports with simple yet relevant tools.
In the medium term, most likely for many organizations, the entire strategy must be reconsidered and linked to relevant performance scorecards in which simple measurements can be combined with more complex KPIs to provide a holistic overview of performance.
3. Focus on building the right mindset for each job than defining the specific job outputs
Many organizations invest a significant amount of time in identifying the right KPIs and targets to capture as precisely as possible the employee’s performance or productivity. Moreover, the more complex the job is, the more difficult it is to capture all contributions in relevant KPIs. In a volatile business environment, such an approach makes targets and KPIs obsolete the moment they are communicated.
The performance criteria used for employee evaluations should be flexible, easy to adapt and more focused on the extent to which the role is successfully achieved, as compared to looking at operational details. For example, it should be less important if the employee delivered one or three safety awareness sessions to factory workers if their awareness level is at the desired level.
One methodology that can be used at the employee level is the Objectives and Key Results Framework. OKRs are set and reviewed quarterly, but they can be changed even more often if the result set is no longer of interest. They emphasize on the importance of personalizing the objectives and key results and making the employee accountable for setting and monitoring them. Not all key results have to be KPIs; some of them can be reflected by completing an initiative or other types of results.
The end purpose of an OKRs system is not to compare employees or indicate what percentage of your staff are high performers. This methodology aims to facilitate communication, clarify expectations, align work activities to corporate strategy, and to provide a tool for managers and employees for discussing individual performance and improvement opportunities.
If you can name one thing, what is the most important driving factor of your business? The answer might be varied depending on your line of work or industry, but there is one answer that would most likely resonate with all: the customer. People who work in customer engagement, sales, and other customer-facing jobs know it best. Yet it might help to take a better look at your customers and their behaviors, regardless of what your market is.
Customer service is an experience
Often overlooked as a complementary part of a business, many failed to consider how important it is to maintain a good relationship with the customers. Looking at it from the customer’s point of view, the service they experience can be a critical aspect that can help decide how certain products or services are valued in a company. A study published by Harvard Business Review concluded that customers do remember good and bad customer service experiences and are willing to reward companies that give them good services.
A similar survey conducted by American Express showed that seven out of 10 consumers in the United States decided to spend more money with a company that offered great customer service. Understanding what a good customer experience seems like a simple job. After all, almost all of us were customers for another’s business at some point. Even so, it is also a fact that bad customer experience has been the downfall of a lot of businesses.
An article written by Amy Gallo pointed out several things that helped determine what a good customer experience is. First, customers value your active presence in any online platform, including social media. The second is that customers value a fast and reliable response; some studies even show that a fast response is directly linked to sales performance.
Third, customers will feel more engaged with the business if they can get a response, regardless if it will be received with a bad, good, or neutral tone. Responding to both positive and negative comments is proven to give a better impact on the customer rather than ignoring them. Finally, it is important to build a personal connection with the customer; remember that customers are human beings too, thus it is important to treat them as a person. It is always helpful to try understanding them by reflecting on how you want to be treated if you were in their position.
The big potential in recurring customers
Acquiring new customers is important, but keeping your existing customer base is also very crucial. Research by Frederick Reichheld showed that a 5% increase in customer retention can boost your profit by 25-95%. It is also important to note that following up with existing customers often costs less than acquiring new ones. Signing up for the Certified Customer Service Performance Professional course can also help in helping your organization perform better with your clients.
It is a given that having a good customer engagement process will definitely help to secure recurring customers. Even so, it may be not enough to build a long-term connection. There are few other things to consider if you want to increase your client retention rate. Regular contact is believed to be the most effective way to maintain relationships and minimizing churn rate.
Keeping them in the loop for new products and taking note of their feedback can also positively impact your relationship with the customers. Similar to any other human relationship, it is always a good thing to feel involved and heard. Other benefits such as discounts or loyalty rewards can also boost sales. In the end, your customers are more than just numbers; they are the driving factors that deserve your attention.
