1. Employment security

This is hugely important in taking the time consuming thoughts of “will I still have my job in 6 months? is is worth all of my energy?” and focus that energy onto thoughts of “I’m safe here, I’m going to give them my best”.

Our most important tools for building employee partnership are job security and a stimulating work environment… Certainly there were times when we could have made substantially more profits in the short-term if we had furloughed people, but we didn’t. We were looking at our employees’ and our company’s longer-term interest… As it turns out, providing job security imposes additional discipline, because if our goal is to avoid layoffs, then you hire very sparingly. So our commitment to job security has actually helped us keep our labour force smaller and more productive than our competitors.

Herb Kelleher, CEO, Southwest Airlines

2. Selective hiring

Hire the right people in the first place.

1. Require a larger applicant pool
2. Be clear about the most critical skills and attributions required from the applicant pool
3. Skills and abilities need to be sought in accordance to the organisations approach to market
4. Screen primarily on attributes that are harder to change with training. For example, holding the belief that technical skills are easier to acquire than customer service and team skills.

The degree of cultural fit and the values (personal mission statements) held by the individuals and the organisation can predict turnover and job performance.

3. Self managed teams and decentralisation

In respects to organisational design, another practice of successful businesses are the smaller, self managed teams and decentralisation. Team based organisations help bring a sense of accountability to each individual and how their role is plays an important part in the success of the business. This increased sense of responsibility often stimulates more initiative and effort.

Working with teams also makes more room for pooling ideas in order to come up with more creative and effective solutions to problems.

4. High compensation

Pay higher comparative to similar positions in the same industry. When you pay higher, you not only attract the right people, but can expect better outputs. A case study has shown that a business was failing enormously. The managers were being paid less than the front line staff. When pay was increased for the managers the business took a quick turn. This success was attributed to the idea that the managers were then able to focus their energies on improving performance rather than worrying about their pay.

5. Training

Training is an investment for staff on the businesses behalf, but in a world of calculating return on investment (ROI) training often doesn’t sit too well as it is difficult to measure. Investing in training for staff has been said to be more of a faith-based investment.

6. Reduction of status differences

The foundations of high performance management systems is based around an organisation’s ability to tap into the skills, ideas and efforts of all of their people. Thus, in order to help make each individual feel valued and important, high performance management systems attempt to reduce the status differences that make individuals or groups feel less valued. Think open plan, think shared wind-down relax zone for upper management and front line staff – remove the silos and bring them together.

7. Sharing information

Sharing information is essential to high performance systems. Sharing information (such as financial performance, strategy, operations) conveys a sense of trust to the people. This factor is important not only if you want to build a high trust organisation and culture, but also in order to equip all staff with the knowledge they should be aware of in order to be able to more effectively contribute to the businesses performance.

This list of seven practices of successful organisations, and my thoughts and explanations on each, are as suggested by Jeffrey Pfeffer and John Viega in their academic article, ‘Putting people first for organisational success’.