Wouldn’t you love to have a culture of employee responsibility where everyone tries to maximize cost savings on every spend without sacrificing quality; strives to qualify vendors aggressively; works to be accountable for falling short on expectations; creatively solves problems instead of making excuses?
Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Savings targets get missed, cost guidelines get exceeded, resource deliveries get delayed, vendors prove to be unreliable, internal customers get mad. The list goes on and on.
And so does the list of excuses. “The stakeholder didn’t involve us until the last minute. How can I meet goals with our antiquated system? The goals for this project were unrealistic. The internal customer kept changing his mind. The vendor was a flake. It’s not my fault.”
How do you get more employee responsibility?
I was recently asked by INSIDE SUPPLY MANAGEMENT MAGAZINE to write an article on employee responsibility. This is one of my favorite management topics because it’s the one I hear the most complaints about from my clients. It seems that there’s always a few employees who either fail to see what needs to be done, ignore it when they see it, or intentionally don’t do it because they think it isn’t their job. In today’s world, that kind of attitude just doesn’t cut it. The challenge for managers is to build a culture where it wouldn’t occur to employees to not jump in and do what is necessary for the team to succeed. Of course, even the best companies who appear on the Fortune 100 List of Best Companies To Work For will have a few employees who don’t buy in to the culture, no matter how positive, so there sometimes needs to be rehabilitation efforts for these folks as well as some occasional weeding of the garden.
In the article, I expand on what you can actually do to create a culture employee responsibility.
