Employee quality: A requisite for becoming a high‐performance organization

Abstract

© 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/ert.21375 Great companies know that it is a precondition to hire and retain employees who have an incurable curiosity, want to be challenged, need to have responsibility and at the same time ask to be held accountable, and want to perform better . . . everywhere and anytime. These employees perform better than the average employee, and, because of that, they contribute more to the effectiveness of the organization. With this type of employee, any business can transform itself into a true high-performance organization (HPO). A high-performance organization is one that achieves financial and nonfinancial results that are exceedingly better than those of its peer group over a period of five years or more, by focusing in a disciplined way on what really matters to the organization. Over a period of five years, we conducted research into what makes an HPO. This has included a review of 290 studies into business high performance and excellence, a personal survey of close to 1,470 organizations throughout the world, and the collection of numerous in-depth case studies of highperforming companies representing nearly every continent. Through this research, we’ve determined the HPO Framework—a conceptual, scientifically validated structure that practitioners can use for deciding how to improve organizational performance and make it sustainable. The HPO Framework includes five factors of high performance: (1) management quality, (2) openness and action orientation, (3) long-term commitment, (4) continuous improvement and renewal, and (5) employee quality. This article focuses on the fifth factor: employee quality. An HPO makes sure it assembles a diverse and complementary workforce and recruits people with maximum flexibility to help detect problems in business processes and to incite creativity in solving them. An HPO continuously works on the development of its workforce to train staff, letting them learn from others through partnerships, inspiring them to improve their skills so they can accomplish extraordinary results, and holding them responsible for their performances. This factor can be broken down into four important characteristics: (1) inspiration, (2) resiliency and flexibility, (3) diverse and complementary, and (4) partnership.