systematicHR

Julia Hanna recently wrote about the use of stretchwork applied to career advancement in the August 9 issue of HBS Working Knowledge.  Stretchwork has been a tool utilized by performance management professionals for ages.  In truth, we in HR have known about stretchwork long before the academics decided to study it.

The concept of stretchwork is simple.  When you have employees who are already sufficiently competent in their current jobs, how do you get them to grow?  Stretchwork is simply a term that means you’ll give them projects outside their normal comfort zone which will force them to utilize new skills, work with different people, and consider new ways to think about their work.

Old school “manager trainee” positions that were once sought after by new college graduates employed this exact methodology.  Knowing these new grads didn’t have any of the competencies to be managers, they inserted the trainees into the business, and once that part of the business was learned the trainee was rotated.  It was understood that the quickest way to get the trainee to desired job was to expose them to broad aspects of the business and move them to new areas when the time was right.

How do we identify appropriate candidates for stretchwork?  Well, there are a couple of concepts you should consider:

1. In theory, everyone should be a candidate for stretchwork:  In order to highly engage your employee base, each employee needs to be challenged and every employee needs to see the growth path.
2. In reality, your managers hopefully know who the employees are that want the growth opportunities and if they are qualified for them.
3. Also in reality, there are some employees who really don’t necessarily strive for growth, but they are great candidates for future growth.

If we take points #2 and 3, the idea that employee growth should be applied for the sake of employee engagement (and all the benefits thereof), are especially true for these populations.  If an employee wants to grow but isn’t presented the opportunities, they will leave.  If an employee is a consistently high performer, but is satisfied where they are, another competing firm will hire them away.

Once again I tackle the sensitive subject of whether we (in HR) trust our managers to monitor all these activities and desires of our best employees.  The answer as usual is a resounding “no.”  That’s not to say that many or even most managers are incapable.  The small percentage of managers who aren’t great make it necessary for us to have more focus.  The solution is technology.

Unified talent management solutions obviously help us identify our best employees through performance management.  Through the integrated workforce management and competencies modules, we should be able to identify the best means of presenting career ladders and career planning tools to both the employee and manager.  The hope is that the manager and employee would then execute some of these plans as part of their performance objectives for the next performance period.

We have amazing tools these days and the integration possibilities are expansive.  While stretchwork is not a new concept in HR, it’s critical that we’re able to apply some of these older concepts to our theories and strategies of managing and engaging our workforce.