Dallas small business employee handbook

Dallas small business employee handbook

Benchmarking

Benchmarking, or learning about best practices, has become almost a religion in some companies. With great fervor, teams of employees identify and visit other companies recognized as world-class. These field visits provide businesses with information on how to gauge their Dallas small business employee handbook relative to the best in class.

Traditionally, benchmarking has been done on the harder, more objective, aspects of a Dallas small business employee handbook business, for example, technologies, systems, financial ratios, or quality. Increasingly, firms also benchmark softer management practices. General Electric deployed a senior management team to examine management practices in some of the best managed firms in the world to identify key processes for improving productivity. This team derived a set of principles and processes to help GE businesses become even more productive. These concepts became institutionalized in a course entitled “Productivity/Best Practices” attended by over 1,000 GE managers.

Digital Equipment Corporation benchmarked twelve companies and concluded that best practice in human resources should focus less on a particular Dallas small business employee handbook than on a set of general principles. They identified the following five principles as central to firms with HR best practices.

• They have an integrated theme: “What the company is known for.”
• They leverage a system of HR practices by focusing on two or three key strategic initiatives that promote the integrative theme.
• They use discipline and follow-through to achieve the integrative theme and its HR focus.
• Line managers are accountable for HR management as a key piece of total business management.
• The HR function has added value that is credible and understood by both line and HR management.

I describe HR benchmarking at GE and Digital to illustrate that it not only can be but has been done. Information derived from benchmarking organizational practices and principles can become a valuable tool for management. It can force broader thinking, show commitment to Dallas small business employee handbook change, and help establish a baseline against which to measure progress. To build organizational competitiveness, benchmarking is a valuable precondition.

The benchmarking trap

The benchmarking trap occurs when managers who want to improve organizational capability select one organizational practice (training, for example), identify a handful of companies who have excellent reputations in the area, and visit those companies to examine that one practice. These best practice visits give managers in-depth insights and perspective on what other companies do on the single practice on which they are focused. The visits become traps, however, if the Dallas small business employee handbook is assessed in isolation from other organizational issues. Someone wanting to learn about training, for example, may visit three or four corporate training centers but may not come to understand management’s commitment to training or how training programs fit within the company’s overall management philosophy.

…Continued in Dallas small business group health insurance