1 Technology

Technology will continue to dramatically affect the workplace environment and impact the way in which work will be done. This includes the rise of ‘virtual organisations’ and a capacity for individuals to work anywhere at any time.

HR staff will need to use the new technology to become more time effective and cost efficient and also enable line managers and staff to carry out their human resource management responsibilities more effectively. Technology is also creating a more informed employee, who will use self-service systems to take on more personal responsibility by accessing information about their own training and development, their own career management and their own benefits programmes.

There is a need for greater coordination and collaboration between information technology departments and human resource departments to bring this about.

2 Employment trends

There is a continuing use of contingent workers and more flexible work arrangements. Outsourcing and off-shoring practices have begun to level off and are not nearly as attractive as they were initially. Telecommuting and highly paid knowledge workers have become the norm. There is evidence of workers desiring and obtaining a financial stake in their organisations.

The global economic downturn that occurred in 2008/9 has created a dramatic shift in the workforce talent pool. Retirement patterns have shifted. Career progression plans have been altered. The supply of highly qualified workers who have lost their jobs through company closures and dramatic patterns of downsizing have created an entirely new employment landscape within the past two years. This series of shifts is discussed in more depth later in this chapter.

3 Demographics

The world population is growing at a high rate in developing countries, but is stable or decreasing in the developed world.

In Western countries, there is a significantly increasing proportion of the workforce aged 50–59. This brings with it a range of issues, including maintaining the commitment of older employees, motivating younger workers, funding retiree benefits and managing higher healthcare costs. Work may need to be redesigned to accommodate flexible scheduling and early retirement, or retirees choosing to return to the workforce on a part-time or contractual basis.

As this book is being finalised, the global economic meltdown has suddenly created some huge shifts in workplace demographics. Unemployment rates are rising due to a number of organisations being closed down or dramatically consolidated. Many talented people are eagerly looking for good jobs – but their specific solution may lie in seeking out new career fields.

Additionally, the younger workforce, typified by Generation X’ers, Generation Y’ers and the Dot Com workers, bring with them their own demands and expectations of the workplace and of their employer. The members of Generation X and particularly Generation Y will inevitably have as much influence on society over the next ten years as the Baby Boomers did over the past twenty years.

4 Changing work agenda

There is an increasing shift in the relationship with employees in the workforce. The issue of diminished loyalty to individual employers has been reinforced by the increased emphasis being placed on individuals for their own success. This is placing greater emphasis on the need for managers to develop more effective ways to reward and recognise employees and to help them to remain highly motivated and engaged, especially during periods of turbulence.

5 Globalisation

By 2020, four of the world’s largest economies will be Asian – China, Japan, India and Indonesia. Globalisation will render terms such as ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ much less significant than they are today. Managers able to work in a global environment will be sought after and talent will be tapped locally.

6 Social trends

A 24/7 work culture is having a pervasive impact on society. This brings with it a greater blurring of work time and non-work time. In Western societies, the nature of families is changing with the traditional nuclear family no longer being the norm. In Western countries in particular, there is a trend towards greater diversity in the workplace.¹

 Finding, retaining and developing superior talent.

 Identifying and developing the next generation of leaders.

 Building agile and resilient organisations with the capacity for rapid change.

 Creating organisations and responsive work environments that generate high employee commitment and performance.

 Aligning performance and rewards to strategic priorities.

 Using technology and responding to its implications.

 Measuring the impact of HR effectiveness.²

Trend 1 – The impact of technology

Technology has a double-edged impact within a library. It affects each staff member because the methods for storing and retrieving information have become so dependent on technology. While younger staff members may be very comfortable handling the new technologies, some older staff members may exhibit an inherent resistance to adapting to the new techniques. It is often very difficult for older members of the library staff team to recognise that the skills that they have spent years developing are now becoming redundant. It is hard to let go of old habits and practices. In some cases, it can be even harder to embrace the new skills needed for the new workplace. Nevertheless, these types of changes are critical and must be adopted.

While these pressures are occurring, there may also be a secondary issue emerging. The relationship between staff members can often become very strained over the resistance to change internal practices as needed to keep abreast of the changing technology. This can produce a very obvious split within the staff ranks – those who are embracing technology changes and those who are resisting these changes. It is not fair to characterize this split as one that depends on the age of a staff member. It is deeper than that. It is based upon two critical points:

For academic libraries, this trend is particularly significant. The fundamental business of academic libraries is research and information, and with the advances in technology, the whole cycle of gathering scholarly information has been dramatically altered. The pace and the degree of collaboration have been accelerated in today’s information-driven society. The distinctive role of the library staff in the gathering, cataloguing and distributing of information has changed significantly. Today, researchers are also publishing some of their own work, through their own personal websites, which are easily available to them.

In order to respond to these pressures, leaders need to:

Through these techniques, you will dramatically improve the probability of successful implementation of the new technologies with your library staff team.

The second area where technology will have an impact on library staff is the provision of HR services to the library and to your library staff. Academic libraries are part of a larger corporate entity – the university or the college. In the case of municipal or public libraries, you will be a part of the larger municipal organisational structure. In these cases, you will probably have an HR staff member who is your liaison with the larger corporate HR Department. With independent, stand-alone libraries, you will have your own internal HR staff to handle employee-related issues and services.

The delivery of HR services is also undergoing a dramatic shift in technology. Where HR staff advisors used to provide direct information to employees upon request, about their benefits programmes, their professional designation or certification requirements, or their payroll issues, now with new technology much of this information can be provided on-line. Employees, with the proper pass codes, are now able to access their own personnel files and accounts. This enables employees to become much more actively involved in the management of their own career needs and career aspirations. However, it does means that the HR Department staff must also be prepared to embrace the new technologies available to them, or they become the roadblock to developing empowered library staff members. Building a strong collaborative working relationship with the members of the HR Department is vital to ensuring that your staff members receive the types and the level of services that they deserve.

So, technology can hit you from two sides – from within the library itself, as well as from the HR Department. Either way, change is the new norm and leaders and staff need to be both open to change and open to embracing the new technologies which will make your library operation more efficient and more effective in serving the needs of your clients, customers and students.

Trend 2 – The impact of employment trends

What used to represent a ‘normal work-week’ has become a bit of a relic. In today’s hectic world of being continuously wired, the requirements of your customers for information at any time of the day or night mean that your capacity to serve those needs must change to match the requirements.

This may mean offering extended hours. The notion of a library being ‘open’ from 9:00 a.m. until 9:00 p.m. does not align with the changing needs of society. As an undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo, which is located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada in the early 1970s, my ability to complete my course requirements, coupled with my needs to engage in part-time employment to pay the bills meant that I needed to be able to study and complete term papers at odd hours of the day and night. The fact that the university library had adopted a policy of keeping the library open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week was a very new concept at that time. Granted, all of the library’s services were not available, but then not all were required around the clock. The mere fact that one could access information when you were able to do so was an incredible concept in customer service for university libraries at that time. I credit a significant portion of my success in achieving my undergraduate degree to the accessibility of this level of customer service.

In today’s world, access to information is never closed. If students or customers cannot access it by walking into your library, they will access it electronically by ‘walking with their fingers’ somewhere else. If your library has not adopted a more open approach to being accessible for most of the day, you may end up being bypassed by clients who expect availability when they need it, or when they want it – not just when you are ready to be open for business.

To offset this situation, libraries may need to consider a variety of employment alternatives. And not all staff actually prefer a 9 to 5 job cycle nowadays. Some prefer to start earlier and end earlier, while others are just the opposite and prefer a more nocturnal schedule. Some staff, because of child-care or elder-care issues, may actually prefer a split shift arrangement, which was considered a very undesirable working arrangement many years ago. But times do change and the needs of your staff change too. The challenge for any organisation is to ensure that you have the flexibility to change accordingly.

Some staff may have the type of job that is conducive to telecommuting. Are you positioned to be able to make this a possibility? The big fear with telecommuting is: ‘How can you supervise them if you can’t see them?’ The answer is to supervise on the principle of ‘results produced’. Did the employee complete the task, as agreed to, within the timeframe required – even if their schedule meant that they could only work on the assignment between 11:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m.? This approach requires a ‘results-based performance management system’ as opposed to the more traditional system based upon whether or not one was prompt, arrived on time, had a good attendance record, was dressed appropriately and did a reasonably good job.

For many libraries, some of the work that has traditionally been carried out by library staff can now be completed far more efficiently and more effectively through outsourcing to companies that are specifically geared to a particular service component. Are you examining the nature of the work being conducted and are you seriously exploring viable options that will provide an equal or better level of customer service through some external service providers? If not, why not?

In some cases, this may require some delicate negotiations with unions to ensure that the terms and conditions of your collective labour agreement are not violated. Or it may even require that some new terms and conditions may need to be considered for future collective agreements. Most trade unions are primarily concerned with the job security of their union members. So, if outsourcing threatens job security, expect a battle. If, on the other hand, you can arrange to have some routine, mechanistic services outsourced while also providing opportunities for the staff who used to perform those menial tasks to provide more valuable human services within the library, most unions would be hard pressed to find a legitimate complaint about this type of service enhancement, which also provides more meaningful and rewarding work for employees.

Trend 3 – The impact of demographic changes

One of the critical issues with regards to the changing demographics of the workforce is that of the shrinking talent pool that is a consequence of an escalating retirement boom. This shift is also occurring at the same time as we are experiencing a declining natural birthrate phenomenon in many developed countries. It has been stated that for any country to maintain its natural population rate, a birth rate of 2.4 children for every female of childbearing years is required. Census statistics for 2006 in Canada indicate that the current birth rate is about 1.5 children for every female of childbearing years. This means that Canada is in a naturally declining population pattern. This is intentionally offset somewhat by immigration practices and policies. However, when you look around and see the number of ‘Help Wanted’ signs posted around any city in Canada and you listen to the tales of woe of employers who are desperate to secure enough staff to maintain their operations, you know that something is not right. This situation is certainly not limited to just the Canadian workforce scenario either. It is appearing in the USA, in Australia and New Zealand and in many European countries.

We have seen recent situations in which some service companies such as restaurants and hotels have had to curtail their hours of operation, or close portions of their premises because they have been unable to hire sufficient service staff to maintain their normal business operations. Demand is definitely outstripping supply when it comes to the labour pool. Today is an ‘employee’s marketplace’, so whatever practices you can adopt and apply that increase your ability to attract and retain staff will be critical to your continued future success.

Although papers and professional business journals lament the fact that there are a significant number of businesses that are closing, we need to see the whole picture. There are also an unprecedented number of new firms and businesses being started every month. Each of these new organisations requires staff to survive.

As we closed out 1999 and entered the twenty-first century, there was a major concern about the large wave of retiring workers looming on the horizon. The potential loss of corporate memory, intellectual capital and veterans’ knowledge of daily processes and procedures was seen as a huge threat for many organisations. However, with the dramatic shifts in the global economics of the past year or two, many older workers are now re-entering the workforce or delaying their planned retirement dates to offset or rebuild their pension funds. This is a complete turn-around from three years earlier – and it has generated a whole new set of issues and concerns in the workplace, as individuals see some of their potential career opportunities evaporate, with older workers staying in place longer than anticipated.

Where we once feared a significant shortage of qualified workers in many fields, today we are looking at rising unemployment due to layoffs and job losses from mergers and corporate closures. We now have a pool of talented employees eagerly looking for new work – and for many, this may require geographical relocations or shifts in career paths. How quickly things can and do change.

So, the pressures of being able to successfully recruit new staff are quite apparent. But, what about the pressures to ensure that you retain your current staff? In a tight labour market, poaching of qualified staff is common practice. Because of this, staff are constantly on the lookout for better job opportunities. As I am writing this chapter, one of my current clients has just informed me that two of their key players – one a vice-president and one a senior member of staff – had just submitted their resignations. Were they dissatisfied with the work? No. Were they dissatisfied with the working conditions? No. Were they dissatisfied with their pay? No. Then what would cause them to leave? They saw opportunities for better career advancement in different situations outside of their current organisation. In both cases, each individual was working within an organisational structure with young executives above them who didn’t appear to be contemplating any moves in the near future. These two individuals saw their careers becoming stalled. So, they looked to greener pastures – and found them! This type of movement motivated by career advancement potential is becoming quite common.

Professionals who are tracking the career patterns of the current workforce are estimating that new graduates are likely to be engaged in as many as six or seven career changes during their normal working life. That’s career changes – not job changes! The mobility of the workforce of the future will be staggering by the standards of those of us who may have worked for the same employer for twenty-five years or more. We will speak about this phenomenon in more detail in a later chapter.

For many years, we advised clients to look seriously at the way their work was designed, because in the future, they may not be able to secure the same number of employees to complete the work as they have at present. In other words, if you are loosing ten people through retirement, you may only be able to secure six or seven new people to replace those vacancies – either through tougher economic conditions or through tougher recruitment conditions. What can you do to redesign how work is carried out to handle the possible shortfall of qualified replacement staff?

Even as we have shared this message with organisations over the past five years, we have seen some astounding changes unfold. Many of those who appeared ready to move to a state of retirement are not yet prepared to retire and put their feet up and relax – for the next 20–30 years. Many retirees are coming back into the workforce, but under a different set of terms and conditions.

IBM in Canada has a pool of skilled retirees who they call on periodically to contribute their skills and talents on ‘special project assignments’. Any one individual may only work on one or two projects a year, with each project lasting 2–3 months. However, what this arrangement does is:

Several years ago, we saw a Census Canada statistic that was extremely frightening. It stated that ‘the average length of life for a male who worked to age 65 and then retired’ was only eighteen months! After almost 45 years of work!

The ability to engage retiring employees in a meaningful form of employment that capitalises on their specific skills and talents is becoming a huge strategic advantage for some employers. Are there opportunities within your library setting to employ these same tactics? Age and experience are terrible things to waste. Can you find ways to ensure that your corporate intelligence is not lost as employees retire? Can you engage them in some form of alternative employment option that ‘eases them into retirement’, helps to fill a potential staffing void, capitalises on what they have to offer and also helps to orientate and groom younger staff for more responsible senior positions of authority? If you can answer yes to any of these critical questions, then you are ahead of the pack.

In subsequent chapters, we will discuss in detail some of the other demographic issues that are impacting employers – such as the cultural differences in expectations and work ethics of different generational groups of employees.

Trend 4 – The impact of the changing work agenda

As noted earlier, employees of the future are expected to be much more mobile in their careers than we have seen in past generations of workers.

In the past, staff were recognised for 25, 30, 35 or 40 years of service with special celebrations, pins and other awards. In the future, a ‘longterm service award’ may be initiated with an employee who has worked for five or ten years consecutively. He or she may be considered a ‘longterm employee’ in the world of tomorrow.

From an HR perspective, this can create a huge problem. Most of an organisation’s employee benefit programmes have been designed upon a framework of employment longevity. Pension benefits, for example, were ‘vested’ after a set number of years of service, such as ten years. That means that if the employee left before the ten-year anniversary of their employment, the employer’s matching portion of their benefit plan was forfeited. An employee’s length of holiday benefits was increased as their tenure increased – two weeks of holidays in the first five years, then three weeks between five and eight years, then four weeks, for example. Pay increases were often tied to years of service and had little or no bearing on one’s competencies or skills. If you were here longer, you were worth more. Benefits for attending conferences and certain levels of training and development programmes were given to ‘loyal employees’ first. A loyal employee was a long-term employee. So, the longer-term employees were treated better, from a benefits perspective.

In the workplace of today and tomorrow, this approach to benefits management is archaic and terribly out-of-synch with the realities of today’s labour marketplace for a number of reasons:

We often hear older managers use the phrase: ‘There is no longer employee loyalty in the workplace’. We challenge this notion – and quite strongly. There is lots of loyalty by many of today’s workers. However, it may look and feel different than what older managers were used to. If an employee only works for you for a period of 3–4 years, does that make them disloyal if they leave? The real question of loyalty is: ‘Did the employee give us a solid effort while they were here?’ If an employee gives you 100% effort over a few years, is that not better than an employee who has been giving you 75% effort over the past twenty years? Loyalty is best measured on results produced, not on a calendar.

The other point to make about loyalty is that it is most evident when it is reciprocal. If you want loyalty, you get it by giving it to your employees first and they are then predisposed to reciprocate. We have seen numerous instances where employers initiate staff layoffs when there are marketplace slowdowns, and then wonder why staff seem lukewarm in their degree of ‘company loyalty’ when they are brought back after a temporary layoff. How can employers expect employees to help out and pitch in with that extra effort when it is needed, if they have not done the same thing when business was a bit difficult? Those employers that have found ways to keep employees on the payroll when business was down, by assigning them to supplementary tasks, to keep them gainfully employed until the business rebounded have discovered that their employees end up being extremely loyal when the employer later needs them to work extra time or work unusual schedules to accommodate unexpected business periods. There is an old proverb that states: ‘You get what you give.’ That applies very appropriately to organisational and employee loyalty.

Trend 5 – The impact of globalisation

With the latest methods for gathering, storing and retrieving information through the Internet, the effects of globalisation are very obvious in any library around the world. Information no longer has any geographical boundaries. The same applies to one’s access to information.

In the case of academic libraries, the impacts of globalisation are very evident when you examine the changing cultural profile of the student body to be served. Foreign students are enrolling at universities and colleges around the world. And this migration is not one-way. While Asian students are enrolling in American and Canadian universities, North American students are enrolling in programmes in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. We have indeed reached the stage of being a ‘global village’ because of the availability and accessibility of inter-continental travel. In addition, students can enrol in universities and colleges in other locations without actually living there. The rise of distance education, executive graduate programmes and other variations on the more traditional university or college enrollment is putting education within the reach of hundreds of thousands of individuals for whom a graduate or post-graduate degree must have seemed impossible several years ago.

For libraries, this can have a major impact on the languages of the collections that are needed to serve this type of international audience. It may also mean that library staff need to have multi-lingual capabilities to be able to serve a more cosmopolitan clientele. Or it may mean that libraries need to be forging service agreements with local multicultural agencies, which can provide a language capacity or an interpreter capacity to meet the needs of foreign-language students.

As a professional group, librarians have developed an incredible global network of colleagues. This is very evident in the number and frequency of international library conferences and symposia hosted in locations around the globe each year. Key academic library positions are being advertised internationally and there have been many recent examples of Chief Librarian or Library Dean positions filled with individuals from foreign countries. This is adding a whole new dimension of richness and vibrancy to the library community. In many respects, libraries are well ahead of many other professional groups in their hiring and attraction practices.

However, this approach can also have a downside. While external or foreign hiring practices can bring new, fresh blood into an organisation, it also sends a clear message to existing employees who may have been eyeing the new vacancy. An external hire means that the new individual must initially concentrate on building a strong relationship with existing staff and clearly demonstrate their own capabilities, to reinforce the wisdom of the selection team. Failure to do so will inevitably lead to internal strife and staff conflict. The need for relationship building will almost always precede the need for library re-building, when a senior position is filled by someone external to the library – whether from the same country or not. When a foreign country element is injected, this only expands the potential barriers to acceptance by staff.

As an offset to these areas of concern, the global library network also provides some incredible opportunities for library staff to take on a secondment position or a temporary position in another country. Position exchanges are one excellent way in which staff can develop a broader library experience and exposure. One-year assignments through an ‘employee exchange programme’ can give some employees a new lease on life, when their current position seemed dull and boring. Globalisation provides a variety of refreshing opportunities that need to be explored and utilised.

Trend 6 – The impact of social trends

Our current expectation that we should be able to access virtually any business at any time of the day or night, every day of the year, may seem very reasonable when you are the customer and very unreasonable when you are the employee. This can create a significant problem for libraries because it means that staff who may be very accustomed to ‘regular staffing periods’, such as work schedules that run from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. or from 1:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., may be required to provide staffing services to the library at other hours of the day. On the other hand, it may be quite easy for a library to remain open on a 24/7 basis, and not provide staffing for all service functions such as reference and circulation desks outside of standard hours. A library can be kept open as long as appropriate precautions are in place to ensure that library items are not removed without being checked out properly. Security desk staff can monitor this, along with electronic surveillance systems. Or could security staff, who are expected to be on duty around the clock, be authorised to check out certain types of library resources, under certain situations, as long as the normal logging out procedures are carried out? It would appear that there are a variety of service alternatives that could be installed to meet the needs of a client base that prefers to work at all hours of the day or night.

Failure to explore these options can have a negative effect on the credibility of the library as a viable source of information, given the many other sources that are ‘always open’.

However, if you wish to expand your hours of service availability, it will require some corresponding changes to the work schedules of your staff. This could be met with some strong resistance. Or, if it is presented properly, it could provide a variety of employment settings that might even help staff to fulfil their own family and community commitments. As an example, McDonald’s Restaurants have been hiring retirees who are looking for an opportunity to meet and connect with others on a daily basis. These individuals do not mind working a short shift to help handle the lunch hour rush and then come back later in the day for an evening meal shift. This type of ‘split shift assignment’, which is quite common in the food service industry, has been very unpopular with young employees who don’t want their whole day occupied by a split shift time arrangement. This type of split shift schedule gives them very little time for their own personal activities. However, for some older employees, it gives them something to look forward to, as they get out of their own homes twice a day, contribute to providing a valuable service and also get paid.

The point here is that by exploring alternative staffing possibilities, in response to a world that is changing its expectations about what services are available and when they are available, you may well end up providing some unexpected and very effective solutions. Obviously, when expanding services to a 24/7 schedule, one must also be very aware of the related security arrangements that need to be available to staff to ensure that their own physical safety is not compromised. If the costs and arrangements needed to ensure staff safety and organisational security are greater than any corresponding client benefits, then this type of expanded service may need to be abandoned. However, the mere fact that it was explored and examined will provide you with the sound rationale to explain why you are offering the service schedules that you are providing. And you may also discover that you can indeed provide an expanded level of service, even if it is not a 24/7 service, that does come closer to meeting the shifting needs of your client base.

In addition to the issue of staff scheduling to provide expanded services, there is another important feature of the changing social trends within society. The pressures that staff face in dealing with family issues away from work can have a significant impact in their on-the-job performance. Time flexibility to be able to help a family member obtain healthcare services when they are available, time to meet with teachers before the end of the work day to better understand what is happening with a child at school, or any other number of personal life scenarios mean that employees may need to be allowed time off during their normal work schedule. How prepared are you to enable this type of consideration to be a part of your corporate culture?

The importance of enabling employees to attend to personal issues while also attending to your business issues was explained most eloquently by William W. Arnold, President of Centennial Medical Centre in Nashville, Tennessee, in his book The Human Touch: Today’s Most Unusual Program for Productivity and Profit. This book, which was co-authored with Jeanne M. Plas, an Associate Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, was published in 1993. It describes how Bill Arnold instituted a ‘person-centred leadership practice’ at Centennial Medical Centre – and literally turned the organisation around. He developed a set of ten principles of ‘Hard-Nosed Humanism’. Five of these principles are focused on ‘The People Principles’ and five are focused on ‘the Credibility Principles’.

One of the People Principles is: ‘Principle 2: Support Personal and Family Lives’. Here are a series of direct quotes from this book that capture the essence of this principle.

Note carefully the final word in this quotation – ‘temporarily’. This is an extremely good example of the ‘quid pro quo’ that most employers want from their employees when there is a critical project, or a rush deadline or some unexpected overtime required, yet they are not always prepared to reciprocate when an emergency arises within an employee’s life, away from work.

This is a good example of treating all employees with the same level of professional courtesy and respect. Employees do not have to ask permission from a supervisor – they are only expected to inform key people about the absence. This is a true example of employee empowerment at its finest. So, what’s the downside?

What we find so fascinating about this principle of ‘hard-nosed humanism’ is that it truly represents some state-of-the-art thinking. It was initiated at Centennial Medical Center around 1990, almost twenty years ago – and yet it is still viewed today by many executives and managers as ‘new-age thinking’. Sooner or later we must realise that investing in our people can provide a huge payback that makes good social sense and good business sense. One doesn’t need to be sacrificed at the expense of the other.

Challenge 1 – Finding, retaining and developing superior talent

Libraries, just like any other business enterprise, may need to be prepared to deal with a limited number of qualified candidates to fill staff vacancies. The attractiveness of your offer to potential employees will certainly have to be competitive. The calibre of your workplace culture, the degree of staff satisfaction and the level of enlightened management that contributes to building an empowered work place environment will be primary attractors. Your ability to deliver on the promises made when courting new candidates is what will sustain you over the long term.

An intentional, strategic focus on retaining good staff will reduce the anxiety of trying to find new, qualified staff members. Although the logic of this statement appears quite obvious, the true value of this concept is often underestimated. In the field of ‘customer service training’ it is often claimed that it costs twelve times more to secure a new client than it does to satisfy an existing client who might be lost if their concern is not addressed. The same principle applies to staff as well, we believe. We have encountered far too many situations where a staff member has left an organisation, frustrated over a series of small, seemingly minor incidents where management failed to find a satisfactory solution. A series of small investments could have saved a major expense to find a replacement and then train this person to effectively fill the vacancy.

The actual costs of replacing a staff member include much more than the actual cost of placing an advertisement in a local paper or a professional journal. They include the costs lost from the time the employee actually leaves until a replacement is found and trained to the point where they can competently carry out the work of the previous employee. These costs have been estimated by some recruitment firms to run as high as twice the annual salary of a front-line employee and as high as four or five times the annual salary of an executive. They include HR costs, the costs for a recruitment firm if required, the costs for interviewing the final list of candidates, possibly some moving expenses, time and expenses for the necessary orientation, training and development of the selected candidate and the loss of productivity during this whole period, which can run from as little as a four-week period to a year or more for hard-to-fill positions. And this does not take into consideration the impact on the staff morale of other employees who are discouraged when they see good colleagues leaving the organisation.

In contrast, what level of investment would have been required to keep a current employee satisfied so that they wanted to stay? As the hiring scenario heats up over the next few years, the need to place strong emphasis on retaining good staff is ever more important.

This same theme of investing in your people also carries over into providing many opportunities for staff to develop the skills and competencies needed for them to advance and meet their career goals within your organisation. Developing internal staff talent is something that is frequently overlooked, until one or two key staff members leave for more responsible positions elsewhere – because they could not see any real opportunities for advancement within your organisation. Developing your internal talent can occur in many different ways – training and development programmes, special project assignments, developmental opportunities to fill in for staff on leave or on sabbatical, or appointments to special project teams helping to achieve a corporate goal.

Your employees are indeed your most valuable assets. Don’t leave them in a precarious position – because that leaves you in a vulnerable position!

Challenge 2: Identifying and developing the next generation of leaders

In most organisations, including libraries, the most senior staff members often occupy the most senior leadership positions. These are the individuals who have come up through the ranks and have earned their leadership skills through trial, tribulation and time. This group of senior executives is supported by a team of mid-level managers who generally represent many different age groups. Some of these managers are individuals who may be operating at their highest level of responsibility and are not likely to advance further. Others may be young, capable individuals who have demonstrated an ability to provide leadership and direction, and whose future holds much promise.

The ‘boomer generation’ of leaders is moving closer to the ‘retirement boom’ that is expected to begin around 2011, as the first group reaches that magical age of 65 and is expected to begin retiring in large numbers. The critical questions looming are ‘Who will replace our current leaders?’ and ‘Are they ready?’

The answers to these questions will spell success or doom for organisations over the next five to ten years. Ironically, there is a paradox within this scenario. While organisations fret over this transfer of leadership, the new crop of young leaders are anxious to be given the opportunity to demonstrate that they have the talent, the ability and the skills to assume the leadership roles. In fact, one of the most valuable attractors of any organisation to younger generations is the opportunity for career advancement and more responsible leadership roles. They see this ‘retirement boom’ as a great opportunity for career advancement. But again, are they ready?

If you feel they are not, then that is a statement about your lack of attention to preparing and grooming the new batch of potential leaders. Every organisation must spend a significant amount of time, attention and budget on the preparation of the leaders of tomorrow. Yet in many of the organisations we work with, there is a token degree of emphasis placed on building up the leadership talent pool. Consequently, when senior positions become open, libraries may find that they need to hire from outside to secure the talent that is needed. This could produce internal staff dissatisfaction, as potential leaders see another opportunity evaporate. In many organisations, we have seen a pattern where an external hire for a senior position is often followed by a series of staff resignations, as these individuals come to the realisation that career advancement within is always going to be a challenge. They too go outside and look for moves to more senior positions elsewhere.

You can secure a significant return on your investment in your people if you provide the career progression opportunities that enable them to see their careers moving forward in a constructive way. Organisations that we have seen which have handled this potential dilemma very well have instituted a ‘Leadership Development Institute’ or ‘Leadership Development Programme’ that enables them to nurture and grow their own talent pool from within. One client has been running this type of programme for several years and now that they are facing a series of senior management retirements, they have been able to institute an effective Succession Management Programme that draws from the talent pool being groomed in the Leadership Development Institute. They have identified the top 50 corporate leadership positions and are now in the process of identifying at least two staff members who have demonstrated the interest and the capability of filling one or more of these senior positions. This provides them with a talent pool of 100 employees who have indicated and demonstrated an interest in future career leadership opportunities. This is the group that they will invest in over the next two or three years.

The programmes provided in these leadership development initiatives are directed to the skills of leading, guiding and directing others. They are based upon relationship skills, strategic thinking skills and long-term strategic planning skills. The skills of leadership are quite different from the proficiencies of one’s professional career, such as a financial officer or a librarian. The skills of being a good librarian have provided you with the opportunity to assume a leadership role. However, these are not the same skills that you will need to be a good leader in a library setting. New leaders must not rely on their former professional competencies – they must develop the new competencies of being an effective leader.

As an example, we can cite the case of a client in a manufacturing industry. The Chief Financial Officer (CFO) was promoted to the role of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and President. For almost two years, this individual did not bother to hire a new CFO, because she felt that she was the best person suited to fulfil that role. It wasn’t until we asked the question ‘So, while you are doing the CFO job, who is doing the President’s job?’ that she realised that she was sacrificing her primary role to carry on a role that she was very familiar with and very competent at performing. In that moment, she knew that she needed to hire her replacement, get out of the way and let the new CFO do their job. She realised that she needed to concentrate on becoming the most effective CEO and President that she could be. Since then, the organisation has been performing much more effectively. This also sent a strong message throughout the organisation about the importance of grooming the next generation of leaders and creating opportunities for them to advance.

Many of the inherent obstacles to effective leadership transfer will be explored in more depth later, when we explore the dynamics of the resistance to change in the next challenge and again in Chapter 5 and later on in Chapter 8 where we address the ‘Top ten critical HR management issues within a library’.

Challenge 3: Building agile and resilient organisations with the capacity for rapid change

Organisations and individuals have been facing change since the beginning of time. From the day we are born, or from the day that a new organisation is created, change is a constant reality. What has been quite different in this regard over the past number of years is the pace of change. With the advent of new technologies, the business of your business has been bombarded with change after change after change. And a look into the future does not indicate any respite from this onslaught. So, if the pace of change is not likely to be reduced, it is critical for every organisation to take stock of its own capacity for agility, speed and resilience to cope with change and to benefit from change.

Organisations that have been able to successfully capitalise on the waves of change have spent time grooming their staff to deal with the uncertainties of change. In some organisations, they have identified ‘Change Agentry’ as a core leadership competency – when one becomes skilled as a change agent, he or she is able to effectively initiate and install changes that will help the organisation to grow, develop and expand to meet changing customer needs and changing business needs.

When we look at libraries, the notion of a nimble, agile organisation that is eager to embrace change does not readily come to mind. Over the years, many libraries have not been recognised as the ‘leaders of change’. It is not a field that is noted as being nimble and quick to institute changes. It is also a field that is not particularly forgiving – if a change does not work, this is carried in the corporate memory of the organisation for many, many years. We don’t wish to generalise but, as a group, libraries tend to prefer stability. This has been evident in several of our recent client projects; there was much talk about the need for change, but as we began to uncover the level of adjustment that would be needed by staff to bring about the desired changes, resistance set in and numerous reasons were put forward for not making the changes. The battle to retain the status quo can be very powerful.

However, there are several good examples of libraries that have actively embraced change and are moving quickly to reposition themselves in a world that not only expects but also demands more from its libraries than it did in the past. In the January 10th 2007 issue of the Globe and Mail, one of Canada’s national newspapers, there was a fascinating article about the transformation that has occurred within the Public Libraries in the cities of Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Edmonton. This quote captures the essence of the degree of change that has been embraced:

The article goes on to describe some of the new changes occurring within the Edmonton Public Library:

Not your typical image of a traditional library at all. In order for these changes to be imagined and then implemented, staff needed to come to the realisation that if they did not make changes to move with the changing needs and expectations of a changing client base, they would become redundant, irrelevant and end up going out of business. Until staff became convinced of the importance of making these changes, nothing changed. With the changes, the modern-day urban public library has become more visible to a broader clientele of retirees, young children and teenagers. From the perspective of an academic library, this means that when a new wave of students arrive on campus who are familiar with the value of the services of their local urban library, they will be more disposed to frequent the university library – if it offers a similar degree of customer-friendly service and customer comfort.

No doubt there were many skeptics who felt that these changes would not help and that indeed they might even harm the identity of a municipal library. However, the statistics paint a very different picture:

The Grande Bibliothèque in Montreal, which was renovated and modernised only a few years ago, is attracting more patrons than officials had dared dream possible – an average of 8,000 visitors a day, nearly double their initial estimates.⁹

A readiness for change is critical for the future survival of any organisation and libraries are more susceptible than many other organisations to this reality because of the number of alternative options open to patrons. That old axiom of the survival of the fittest in the animal world, when faced with major changes in weather conditions, natural predators or food supply, holds true here too:

Challenge 4: Creating organisations and responsive work environments that generate high employee commitment and performance

The most dominant characteristic of any organisation in which employee commitment and employee performance are exceptionally high is the quality of its organisational culture. This is borne out by research conducted annually by the Great Place To Work Institute, an international body that conducts surveys with organisations who vie for the honour of being named as ‘one of the best places to work in Canada’ (or the USA or Europe, etc.). They conduct their research in 30 different countries in North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia. In 2006, some 1.2 million employees completed the 59-question survey at about 3,000 companies worldwide, which were subject to independent culture audits. The link between performance and culture was highlighted in the April 23rd 2007 issue of Canadian Business, which profiled ‘The Best Workplaces in Canada – 2007′. Graham Lowe, a 30-year expert on workplace issues and a partner at Great Places to Work Institute Canada, based in Kelowna, British Columbia, noted that the result of their 2007 survey, which included more than 13,000 employee surveys ‘… also provides evidence of the rising awareness among corporate leaders that workplace culture can be a competitive differentiator – so much so, that it cannot be left to chance.’ He goes on to say:

The 2007 survey results from organisations and countries around the globe clearly indicate that the loyalty and commitment managers really seek boils down to just one complicated, five-letter word: TRUST. The Great Places To Work Survey Model consists of five dimensions:

Challenge 5: Aligning performance and rewards to strategic priorities

In many organisations, there is a significant disconnection between the overall corporate direction and strategic priorities and the way that employees are rewarded. When recognition and rewards are based upon seniority or years of service rather than on performance and results achieved, the level of trust in an organisation is damaged. When poor performance is overlooked and tolerated it sends a signal that how one performs doesn’t really matter. When good performance and performance that helps the organisation to achieve its strategic priorities are not recognised and acknowledged, this sends a mixed message to staff. In these instances, achieving the organisation’s strategic priorities and goals is unlikely to be met.

To ensure that you don’t create this mixed message about what type of employee performance is needed and expected, you must have an effective performance management system in place that is directly linked to the organisation’s overall strategic plan for the year. If employees don’t know what the strategic priorities are, how can they be held accountable for not meeting them? When employees are not informed about how their performance each year impacts the overall success of the organisation, how can they be expected to improve, or to change behaviour that does not contribute to achieving the strategic priorities?

Many organisations have an ineffective performance appraisal or performance assessment system that is generic in nature and examines things such as attendance, punctuality, job knowledge, etc. These assessments often entail the ‘checking off of appropriate scores in boxes’ on a form that is completed in isolation by a manager or supervisor. The results are then presented to the employee with very little discussion and then the document is deposited in the employee’s personnel file. This type of performance management system is an insult – to the employee, to the manager and to the organisation.

A meaningful performance management system needs to clearly identify the strategic priorities for the organisation and then allow for comments to be written that reflect the degree to which an employee contributed to the achievement of these priorities. The process needs to allow for comments from both the manager/supervisor and the employee. Through meaningful discussion and dialogue, ways to adapt or modify behaviour, adjust attitudes and improve performance can be identified, along with a commitment to produce any changes that may be needed. This dialogue also provides a good opportunity to acknowledge and credit the type of behaviour and contribution that is provided by a high-performing employee. Many enlightened organisations have expanded this process to also include feedback comments from other team members and customers, to provide a more comprehensive 360° assessment of the employee’s contributions.

In addition to having a truly effective employee performance management system in place, it is also critical that recognition and rewards are distributed in a way that reinforces and supports the desired activity and behaviour, while challenging and addressing behaviours and activities that are contrary to what the organisation is trying to achieve. The proper combination of rewards and corrective actions is needed to make the system work.

We had a classic example of the importance of this alignment with a recent client. The organisation was working very hard to install a ‘team-based culture’ as part of their latest strategic planning initiative. After a year and a half of serious effort to make teamwork second nature within the organisation, the senior executive approached us to conduct a review to determine why this new teamwork culture was not taking hold, as planned. After some investigation, the answer became quite obvious. Although the organisation was preaching the importance of teamwork, all of its recognition and rewards were based totally upon individual performance and individual results. Whenever employees were forced to decide between working on their own assignments or working on a team assignment, they opted for the individual assignments – because they knew that their individual results were the basis of their rewards. Once the organisation understood this dilemma and introduced a complementary recognition system that assessed an employee’s individual contributions, as well as his or her contribution to team-based activities, the changes they were trying to introduce began to produce the desired results.

So, there are two key lessons here. First, employees need to know what the organisation’s strategic priorities are and, secondly, they need to be evaluated and rewarded in a way that supports their efforts to achieve these strategic priorities.

Challenge 6: Using technology and responding to its implications

This issue of utilising the new forms of technology that are available within a library system was discussed earlier in this chapter. When we look at the introduction of technology as a human resource challenge, there are a few key points to be reinforced.

With any new technological advance there is a clear need for the development of new skills and abilities to be able to use the new technology. When library leaders introduce new technologies you are also obliged to ensure that appropriate training is available for staff to learn the new systems. Time must also be made available for them to develop these new skills – and this is all part of their regular ongoing job. It is not something that employees are expected to ‘pick up on their own’. If the technology is important to the library, then it is also important enough to become part of an employee’s ongoing development programme.

During the introduction of new technology, expect that performance will suffer. It is unrealistic to expect performance to stay at a high level when you are trying to learn a new skill. We have seen too many situations where senior managers say that they understand that employees are on a learning curve, yet at the same time are prepared to criticise these same employees for any drop in productivity. Tolerance for errors during a learning cycle is required. Time to learn the new skills and behaviours is required. Reinforcement for the efforts of employees during a changeover to a new technology is required. Without this type of support, the change to the new technology is doomed.

Whenever a new technology is introduced, be prepared for the possibility that some employees will resist the change because they prefer the old one. They are more comfortable with the old technology, because they are familiar with it and they know how to function using it. The new technology presents the need for personal learning and personal change. Fear of failure at mastering the new technology can create resistance. So, as part of the transition period, you need to be clear that while employees are learning the new technology, the old format will be maintained as a parallel system – however, they also need to know that at a specific point in time, the conversion will be completed and only the new technology will be in place. To continue to keep both systems in place indefinitely provides employees with an option to use either one – and they will inevitably gravitate to the one that is most comfortable for them, which will prolong the transition and add to confusion.

Challenge 7: Measuring the impact of HR effectiveness

If, as we claim, the human resource function is an extremely critical one for any organisation, then it only stands to reason that those who provide human resource services within the organisation also have a critical role to fulfil. HR staff are often heard to complain that ‘their services are not fully valued’, and in many cases, that statement is correct. However, the blame for this feeling that ‘I don’t get any respect’, as the famous US comedian Rodney Dangerfield was heard to lament day after day, lies at the feet of the HR team, not with those they serve.

HR staff are often characterised as ‘those touchy-feely folks who are only focused on the soft side of business’. As such, they may not demonstrate that they have the skills to provide the statistical data that support the value of their role to the organisation. Having spent many years of my career in the field of HR service delivery for a large public sector organisation, I can attest to the fact that it was very hard to get any attention, appreciation or respect – if we did not have the factual data to back up the claims that we made about the importance of our services.

Financial staff seem to garner more attention when they speak, because they have the business information and solid data to support their claims. HR staff are not good at ‘speaking finance’. We need to develop the proficiency of being able to assess the impact of our service delivery and then being able to convert that information into tangible numerical data that demonstrate the impact we can have on the bottom line. When we have these data and learn how to use them effectively, the interest of the executive team will increase very quickly.

In saying this, we do not want to take the ‘human’ out of the human resource function. The organisation definitely needs a team to hold the concern for the ‘people component’ of the business. Just as HR staff don’t ‘speak finance’ very well, most financial staff don’t ‘speak people’ very well. Keeping these two ingredients in a state of balance will provide a healthy emphasis for the organisation. But, each group would do well to learn some of the skills of the other.

In Chapter 6, we will outline a ten-step Strategic People Management Process that incorporates a very important component of the HR service function – the Key People Success Measures. These are specific measures that will demonstrate the true value of HR to the organisation. With many of our clients, this step has become an invaluable one for them as they begin to provide solid information, backed up with sound data, to demonstrate whether or not HR is pulling its fair share of the load on the way to business success.

The importance of using HR metrics was outlined very clearly in an article in HR Magazine, the monthly publication of the Society for Human Resource Management, based in Alexandria, Virginia, USA. In the April 2007 issue of the magazine, there was an article outlining the recent initiatives to dramatically restructure the HR function at IBM. This was a $100-million project, so the risk was very high and Randy MacDonald, Senior Vice President of HR, knew this only too well. Back in the mid 1990s IBM was in a critical state, and close to bankruptcy. Today it is focused on a major re-building plan, under new leadership.

This is a pretty powerful declaration from the CEO of one of the world’s major corporations. In order to support this bold, strategic stance, Randy MacDonald leans very heavily on providing statistical metrics that show how this $100-million investment is being used – and more importantly, how it is providing a meaningful return to the success of the business. He knows that if he cannot demonstrate a solid return on investment for the $100 million his executive colleagues have invested in his strategic people planning efforts, the level of respect and subsequently future support for any of his proposals will be severely damaged.

So, what does this mean for your own library? Well, for starters, your HR staff team needs to be very clear that the library executive team is one of their major customers and as such they should be striving to ensure that you are satisfied with their services. They can establish targets and goals for assessing your level of satisfaction, for instance. They can also measure things such as the length of time it takes to fill a vacancy, or the percentage of staff who are actively engaged in their own career development programme each year. Monitoring the rate of staff turnover can help to determine why staff are leaving, so that some changes can be made to increase retention rates.

If another department within your organisational structure is providing your HR services, such as at a university or a municipality, then you can ask them to provide you with data that indicate whether or not their service delivery is improving. If you are operating as a standalone enterprise, then you can ensure that your own HR staff are looking for ways to develop metrics that assess the level of internal service quality that they are providing to their colleagues within the library.

The value of measuring and reporting the results become evident when we reflect on two truisms that are quoted regularly: ‘What gets measured gets done’ and ‘People do what you inspect more than what you expect’. In both cases, metrics are important tools to provide validation when changes are warranted.

Our aim in this chapter was to outline the major trends that are affecting HR Management as we move into the second decade of the twenty-first century. While these trends affect all types of business operations, those who provide HR services within a business are also faced with some major issues and challenges. The level of collaboration and partnership that exists between HR staff and their client groups – the executives, managers, supervisors and employees of their own organisation – will be critical to achieving future success goals. From the examples discussed in this chapter, these same issues are having and will continue to have a significant impact on the provision of library services. To ensure relevancy, every library must focus on maximising the potential talent and skills of its workforce. Your people will make the difference – if they are onboard and support your future strategic plans. So, if you do believe that your human resources are your most critical asset, don’t leave it to chance!

 We have examined a set of six emerging future trends in HR Management – technology, employment trends, demographics, the changing work agenda, globalisation and social trends.

 We explored the impact of these emerging future trends within a library setting.

 We identified a series of seven Key Human Resource Challenges facing most organisations today and also looked at how these challenges can impact a library.

 This chapter focused on looking at large, global trends – while also recognising that these same trends can influence and impact the workplace situation in libraries of different type and different sizes, regardless of their geographical location.

The ART of People Management