Saturday, May 17, 2008
First Do No Harm
First do no harm. It's a statement you hear most often associated with the medical community. However, what if this same caution should be applied to HR? Let me explain. In several studies that I have done over the last 20 years I have found an interaction effect in analyzing employee survey data that leads to the following conclusion: Increasing employee engagement or satisfaction survey scores for "low energy" employees has a negative effect on their performance. Basically, the action plans that we give managers can do more harm than good for a specific subset of the employee population. I was presenting this research last week to a group of senior HR executives, and they all had examples of this phenomenon in their own firms. One executive asked me if I thought the 'best place to work' surveys were bad, because she was convinced that their firm's actions to become a best place to work backfired in just the way that my research shows. Comments?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Take the Anti-Scrooge Pledge for 2023
Take the Anti-Scrooge Pledge for 2023
-
I have been thinking about teaching an executive development class focused on learning how to be a good consumer of research. I developed th...
-
2021 may become known as the the year of the employee. 2021 is characterized by more employees having more choices about where they will wor...
-
It's been many years since we in the HR world started talking about employee engagement. And since that time the following has happened ...
-
YOUR ORGANIZATION IS MADE UP OF MORE THAN ONE ASSET Click to get the technical report Organizations, whether small or large, global or lo...
-
Company Culture It's one of those words that conjures up all sorts of images. I used to think it was a very cool word. I'd pict...
2 comments:
I heard the statement as: Above All Do No Harm. How often do we harm the very efforts we strive for because of ignorance even our own benign ignorace. Good point.
This is entirely consistent with the idea that it is common for HR depts to be unwilling or unable to evaluate the impact of interventions.
The only way we could know if we are doing more good than harm is to 'go and see'.
Is it stretching the medical metaphor if we say this is like performing surgery with our eyes tightly shut? (maybe for fear of seeing blood!)
Post a Comment