Valuing Employees and Partners

An organization’s success depends increasingly on the diverse backgrounds, knowledge, skills, creativity, and motivation of all its employees and partners.

Valuing employees means committing to their satisfaction, development, and well-being. Increasingly, this involves more flexible, high-performance work practices tailored to employees with varying workplace and home life needs.

Major challenges in the area of valuing employees include (1) demonstrating your leaders’ commitment to your employees’ success, (2) providing recognition that goes beyond the regular compensation system, (3) offering development and progression within your organization, (4) sharing your organization’s knowledge so your employees can better serve your customers and contribute to achieving your strategic objectives, (5) creating an environment that encourages risk taking and innovation, and (6) creating a supportive environment for a diverse workforce.

Organizations need to build internal and external partnerships to better accomplish overall goals. Internal partnerships might include labor-management cooperation. Partnerships with employees might entail employee development, cross-training, or new work organizations, such as high-performance work teams. Internal partnerships also might involve creating network relationships among your work units to improve flexibility, responsiveness, and knowledge sharing.

External partnerships might be with customers, suppliers, and education organizations. Strategic partnerships or alliances are increasingly important kinds of external partnerships. Such partnerships might offer entry into new markets or a basis for new products or services. Also, partnerships might permit the blending of your organization’s core competencies or leadership capabilities with the complementary strengths and capabilities of partners.

Successful internal and external partnerships develop longer-term objectives, thereby creating a basis for mutual investments and respect. Partners should address the key requirements for success, means for regular communication, approaches to evaluating progress, means for adapting to changing conditions. In some cases, joint education and training could offer a cost-effective method for employee development.