Note: The following is the second article in a monthly series addressing the important topic of building Meaningful Employment Environments.

It is a distinct honor of mine to sit on the executive board of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence. This honor is best described as an ability to have many conversations about many topics with many highly engaged and knowledgeable leaders. One of the most frequent conversations these days surrounds the topic of our challenges with our ability to attract, recruit, develop and retain top talent. This is particularly evident within the ranks of our frontline team members. These challenges, and the work we are all doing to mitigate the impacts of these challenges, have re-introduced the concept of workplace stability.

The concept of workplace stability is well known. However, it can be challenging to articulate. In many respects, it’s easier to talk about workplace instability, as this is much easier to see, feel, and relate to. However, if workplace stability is what we are trying to achieve, it’s important that we are aligned on the term.

To understand the concept of workplace stability, we first need to decide what elements of the workplace we are talking about. Workplace stability could reference financial stability, product-quality stability, manufacturing stability, or other items that form a long list of organizational systems or processes. For our purposes, we will address workplace stability as it relates to people in the workplace.

Traditionally, when we talk about stability within our workforce, we commonly describe it in terms of employee turnover. This is an understood concept and reasonably easy to measure. However, this one description is incomplete. Workforce stability is not simply a function of whether people are leaving the company, but it is also about the people who remain, the people who are actually running the business. Therefore, when we think of stability within the workforce, we need to ask ourselves, do we have the right people in the right roles with the right skills and the right attitudes? Think of this as the Perfect Order of People, which is a very important concept as it leads directly to the single most important factor for workplace stability, Team Member Participation.

Team Member Participation

It is generally accepted that having the right people in the right roles with the right skills and the right attitudes will produce an employment environment where people will be participative. It is also generally accepted that team member participation is the number one driver for organizational success.

What does it mean for a team member to be participative?

In a thriving employment environment, team members participate by believing in the organization and by building sincere, honest, and trustworthy relationships across all levels of the business. In addition, team members participate by working hard with the organization to ensure their personal fundamental needs are being met and by knowing, understanding, and improving the work environment they are sharing with others. Last, and critical to our stability conversation, team members participate by knowing, understanding, and improving the actual work.

Here is a hypothesis: Team members who are highly participative will be growing and thriving, and people who are growing and thriving will be more productive.

Workplace Productivity

Workplace stability and productivity are two sides of the same coin. Too often we view productivity as working fast and furiously to continuously achieve some stretch goal that everybody feels is unrealistic. The image of a hamster on a treadmill is common. Examples of this treadmill in real life are measures that are defined by the number of something/ per hour. While these measures are ubiquitous, their ‘incompleteness’ often makes them more harmful than helpful.

Productivity is our ability to achieve realistic goals in a consistent manner. That is, we can define productivity as achieving consistent, stable, and reliable performance on realistic targets by having team members who have a deep understanding of operational processes and are highly participative in the workplace.

Therefore, to connect participation and productivity; workplace stability is when an organization consistently and reliably achieves performance and productivity goals because they have the right people in the right roles with the right skills and the right attitude with a high level of participation.

And in the spirit of simplification, let’s just say that workplace stability is when we consistently achieve our productivity goals because every team member is participating and thriving in the workplace.

With this in mind, creating workplace stability as it relates to our people systems should be a top priority for leaders as we navigate through our workplace challenges that exist today.

In next month’s installment, we will examine the costs associated with workplace instability to fully understand the opportunities and financial reasons to create meaningful employment environments for all team members.