Let's Swap Employees, Too
Link:
Ikea launches Furniture swap in Amsterdam > Inside Retailing > Articles page
.
The first thing that attracted me to the article above - which is about a very inventive furniture-swapping scheme in the Ikea store in Amsterdam - is that I'm in Amsterdam for a couple of days, and I'm curious about the culture (I just spent two hours at a dinner with clients, picking Dutch people's brains for interesting factoids). So when I got back to my room and started surfing the net for articles to blog about, this caught my eye.
Basically, the Amsterdam Ikea store is having a day where customers can bring in furniture and swap it for furniture that other people bring in. I'm sure it will be fun; it's great publicity for Ikea; and - no doubt - also good business. As people are walking out of the store (freshly swapped), they'll also spot an Ikea lamp or rug that will be just the thing to make their new/old furniture look perfect.
But then I started to think about this relative to jobs. In the session I was leading today, with a group of European managers from Rockwell Automation, we ended up talking quite a bit about people who don't perform well simply because they're in the wrong job. It happens all too often, from my point of view, that when someone's not doing well, the manager just assumes the person's not capable or not motivated, overall...vs. just that they're not capable or motivated in that job.
As a result, I believe a great many people get fired who might have been extremely successful doing different jobs in the same organization.
So, I say we emulate Ikea: let's swap employees. For instance, let's say you're a manager in Sales, and you have Employee A who you think is smart and has good skills, but is a bad fit for the job she's currently doing; you think she might do well in Marketing. Your friend, the head of Marketing, has Employee B who is very unhappy in his current job, and who might be very well suited to doing Employee A's job. The two of you talk to your employees; both are enthusiastic; the jobs are at basically the same level; the company supports the move -- voila! employee swap.
I notice this happens fairly often in small companies, where things are informal, and where the leaders tend to want to keep people they think are good, and so find jobs that suit them. In larger companies, the processes and rules necessary to keep the enterprise moving forward often get in the way of this kind of common-sense changing out of employees.
HR people and line managers might want to work together to look for ways to make this "swapping" easier in their company. When you look at the costs - both psychic and financial - involved in turn-over, it makes perfect sense to try your best to find a better job fit for an under-performing employee, vs. letting him or her go. Especially if that person seems enthusiastic and positive, and like a good fit culturally...don't throw him/her away -- look for a swap.
