House Gate Analogy - HR's New Role in Sustainability

Every often, in organizations the Strategy flows from the top level to the bottom. But not all the time the strategies are completely translated into actions by the employees. Even the managers in the middle encounter a lot of misunderstandings and confusions in the stretch of strategy execution. The basic reason for this has been identified by experts and it is called the “Information Gap”.

                It is not difficult for Organizations to find Talents, Resources, Material, etc if proper price is paid. All these being available, organizations are still fighting to envisage what exactly is missing to achieve what it desires. To understand that, consider this simple approach called “house gate” analogy.

In this approach, a house gate is seen with the perspective of an Organization. One side of the gate is the top management which decides on the strategies and the other side is the operations which just executes whatever been formulated. The ‘link’ at the centre is many times ignored because of its smaller magnitude to attract importance, or those which are not perceived attractive to show interest of high magnitude. The missing smaller links could be

1.       Difference between Organizational and Native culture

2.       In understanding Employee Mindset

3.       Understanding Local Culture

4.       Ignoring the Individualism among employees and

Both the gates along with the link should function properly in order to enable “sustainability”. A stronger house gate provides a better feeling of security to its employees, Stake holders and of course the owner. Deterioration to any one of these sides of gates or to the link will result in overall insecureness to every stakeholder.

All these missing links (the latch) can be linked but involves lot of human and cultural interferences. Though strategy and operations are performed by different entities, internal information gaps can be addressed by HR only more efficiently than anyone because of the fact that internal human (not IT) communication is been carried out only by the HR currently in organizations.

ANTI GRAVITY ORGANIZATIONS

Under gravity, things fall down easily and if to fly up, an external force is required. An anti-gravity organization is where stuffs prominently move upward (against gravity) and it is difficult for anything to move downward without an external application of force. Up moving things are profits, talents, and reports etc which move seamlessly with little effort. Meanwhile things that actually should flow down easily, like strategy information, vision, motivation, empowerment etc are not moving easily and are given massive forces to make it move.

                In organizations, people innovate and adapt forward changes only if they are either satisfied or used to the established practices and have a thirst for newer processes. That thirst is created only if they are empowered, motivated, understood strategy, vision, and mission etc to explore existing processes. One important way to accomplish all these is to loosen up restrictions to access required information. In this highly competitive environment, immense amounts of differentiation is demanded and achieving that is possible only if we make sure all the processes run at par with employee satisfaction levels. Once they are at that level, because of the thirst, eventual innovation happens. But these innovations should be in such a way it sticks to the strategy, vision and mission.

LEARN THE FUNCTIONS

Here it is like learning things which are at the front and the back of one’s respective function. In those organizations with highly interlinked and cross linked functions, learning spans its wings in more directions.

All the employees must be informed with the internal operations and functions about the one preceding and one or two succeeding functions.  For example, a person in machining department knows nothing about the assembly department. If people work like this without any connection, they lose their ability to think beyond their present levels. So learning is essential.

If done, he will be able to establish a route to direct his imagination and innovation. For instance, if the manufacturing person has a fair idea about the assembly operations, the next time an innovation comes to his mind, he will automatically think about the possibilities and difficulties in assembly department and may tweak his innovation to accommodate those difficulties. By facilitating one to know about other functions, a Route for his thought process is paved so that his imagination flow is streamlined towards perfection, suitability and sustainability. A well connected system will thus ensure an easier translation of strategy into operations.

DO CUE-MINING

Cue Mining is a simple process which involves simply finding the cues, collecting them, scrutinizing, concatenating, inferring, and reacting. Improvements can be made only if faults are identified. Faults are always hidden. But some cues will be definitely there to indicate that some fault is there somewhere. Any person in the organization should have that sense of Cue Mining. If he reaches the fault spot by cue mining, then using his learned knowledge, he can let his imagination flow in the proper strategic direction and ultimately rectify the flaw or improve the system. Huge amounts of common sense, interpretation skills, cognitive strength, process knowledge etc are needed to do cue mining.

LINK THE GATES

                In any anti-gravity organization, the movement of down moving things are made easy if they

1.       Make employees understand the strategy, vision, mission etc

2.       Make them learn the functions that precedes and succeeds

3.       Make them capable of doing Cue-Mining

To enable these above mentioned points, the role of a HR is immense. By enabling these, organizations will become better capable of exactly identifying that Missing Link or Unclosed link and doing Innovations. And everybody knows what benefits a better innovation brings. Though it initially takes a deluge of planning, time and patience, it brings at the end high amounts of innovation, competitive advantage, superior brand image, sustainability, operational excellence and many more. 

This article of mine got published in the IIM Shillong's Magazine and clinched the "Article of the Month" title. Here is the Link to the Magazine http://www.iims-ushr.in/ .