ThinkingSparks

Employee led

An interesting Tweet by YoxaTweet about research done in The Netherlands by the Hay Group (in Dutch). The outcome of this research is that companies start rewarding their employees according to the Anglo Saxon model. At Hay Group they aren't surprised. According to them it is a logical consequence of:

1. the trend of individualisation,
2. the fact that the reward system is more and more determined by HQ's in other countries, and
3. The Netherlands is turning into a services economy in which the individual makes the difference.

I must say I was surprised by these results. I follow the logic, but I was under the impression that with the financial crisis this whole short term stimulating behavior was not acceptable anymore. I cannot speak for other countries, but I sense that in The Netherlands the public speaks out against (high) individual bonuses and the culture that goes along with it. I also felt that the Anglo Saxon model has received a lot of criticism lately and seen as the root of all evil of the financial crisis. Read this, this, and check out the criticism in the Google search result.

Even greater my surprise when reading an interview with knowledge management expert Mathieu Weggeman yesterday in Management Scope (Dutch only) who states that the new generation of knowledge workers has an attitude that is more congruent with the Rhineland model. He even goes as far as to say that he believes that this new generation will not blossom in organizations with an Anglo Saxon business model.

I find this contradiction between the outcome of the research of the Hay Group and the statements of Mathieu Weggeman very interesting. Intuitively I side with Weggeman and wonder if this whole Anglo Saxon based rewarding model is a question of organizations failing to connect with a new generations of employees. In other words are these organizations not enough "employee led" and implementing a reward system that will not jive with a new generation? It is similar to organizations failing to be customer led. I also wonder what the employer branding strategies of the organizations that participated the Hay Group research are.

Please let me know what you think.

Even the great can fall...

What intrigues me about business is that even the great can fall. It wouldn’t be any fun if they couldn’t. It is this dynamic that keeps me in constant wonder and amazement. Sometimes you can see it coming within organizations. Executives that are driven by ego and power and do not listen to others. Then the cracks will start and eventually those business beasts – I envision some battle from one of the Star Wars episodes – will fall.

Southwest has been in an example in strategy classes. They had “fit”. According to the Church of the Customer they don’t anymore. Has Southwest fallen or has it only landed for a stop over and is it going to take off again?

Rating dinner

Until recently whenever I went out for dinner I checked out IENS, the largest restaurant site in The Netherlands. 53.000 registered tasters rate the restaurants they have had lunch or dinner at. I have been disappointed often as the restaurants could not live up to the expectations I had after checking them on IENS.

Some time ago I had dinner at Fellini in Amsterdam. Back then it was rated with an 8,1 (on a scale from 1 – 10). Now it is rated slightly higher. The food was decent but not worth an 8 or up. Last month I had dinner at Rozemarijn in Maastricht, which is rated at IENS with an 8,8. Rozemarijn comes close to a Michelin rating. The food really is superb.

Afterwards I could not get over the fact that the difference in quality and service didn’t reflect the difference in ratings. I would think that a 7,1 for Fellini would be more appropriate. I felt that there is a flaw in the IENS system. The idea of letting tasters rate the restaurants is great, but how should one value the rating of the individual taster?

What I mean by that is if I would only eat at restaurants with a Michelin star (I wish!) and would rate them with an 8, a restaurant like Fellini would never get an 8. The same works the other way around. If you always eat at restaurants like Fellini and grade them with an 8, a restaurant like Rozemarijn would be close to a 10. If every restaurantgoer would stay in ‘their segment’ it would not be a problem. But consumers tend to be quite heterogeneous these days, and not behaving as the companies would like or expect them to.

On their website IENS states that the ratings the restaurants receive are the average of the individual rates of the tasters. I think it is too one-dimensional and the rates should be calculated another way, somehow taking the tasters’ profile into account. Resulting in more realistic ratings and not raising expectations the restaurants cannot live up to. In turn resulting in me not checking IENS anymore as I do not consider their information reliable.