Leadership

Walking the fine edge between efficiency and consensus.

IT professionals may be uniquely positioned to see and affect a company's "big picture."

Forget capital; it’s relatively easy to obtain nowadays. Today’s scarce, sought-after strategic resource is expertise, which comes in the form of employees. Although organizations have changed mightily from the days of hierarchical, top-down management, they still have a long way to go. In addition to issues of company structure and who should be involved in strategic decision making, there are questions of how the value that companies create should be distributed, now that employees, as well as shareholders, control a scarce resource. And then there are the intangible yet crucial changes that must occur in senior managers’ ways of thinking & #8212; and in the atmosphere and culture of the company. Reorienting old-school senior managers away from capital and toward knowledgeable employees will be difficult, but Christopher Bartlett of Harvard Business School and Sumantra Ghoshal of London Business School have several recommendations for human-resource professionals, who, Bartlett and Ghoshal maintain, will be key players in the design, development and delivery of strategy. Their task is threefold. First, they must build up the company by acquiring and retaining highly skilled employees. Second, they must find a way to embed individual-based knowledge in the company, making it accessible and useful not just to one unit or one function, but to the entire organization. That is the linking task. Finally, there is the bonding task: HR managers must create an engaging, motivating and bonding culture that will attract and keep talented employees. With people in ascendancy over capital, say the authors, it is time to recall what a company actually is: a social institution designed to engage people in the achievement of a valuable and meaningful purpose.

Despite lip service paid to the idea that employees are a company’s greatest asset, too often they are sacrificed in the name of cutting costs and boosting efficiency. But that does not have to be the case. Intensive research by Boston Consulting Group’s Morten Hansen and Michael Deimler reveals that the Internet technology that brought us B2B and B2C is now bringing us B2E: business-to-employee management. By cultivating employees the way it cultivates customers, a company can develop a more satisfied, more productive work force, achieve greater productivity, cut costs and beat its competitors. Hansen and Deimler identify three components in a comprehensive B2E program: online business processes, online people management and online services to the company community. The mode of delivery is the integrated enterprise portal, which provides employees with the tools they need to access information and services at a single location. When business processes are moved online, both the company and its employees gain benefits springing from reduced interaction efforts. Flight crew at Delta Air Lines, for example, bid for shifts and receive their schedules online, which saves the company time and is more convenient for the employees. Online people management is driven by self-service and mass customization: Employees can manage their own training, tailor their own health-care packages and take care of introductory human-resources formalities online. Online community services are driven by the somewhat counterintuitive notion that allowing employees to accomplish certain personal business online at work will make them more productive. The online marketplace offered by Coca-Cola Co. is popular with employees and management alike. To design a successful enterprise portal, companies should follow the model of the online store: Supply features that customers (in this case, employees) want first, and then add features that the company wants the employees to use. Building a portal can be expensive, and it requires a high level of expertise, but the results can transform the company.