We need to get excited about maintenance, according to a great counter-intuitive article by Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel. The authors propose that we should give “maintenance” higher priority in our society. By maintenance they are mostly referring to government-owned physical infrastructure; ensuring it is functioning, well-maintained, and not closed-down for emergency repairs. While the authors also tip their hats to computer infrastructure, the connection to public transit keeps the idea tangible for everyone.
The article asserts that “Americans have an impoverished and immature conception of technology, one that fetishizes innovation as a kind of art and demeans upkeep as mere drudgery.” They highlight that while “innovation” describes the art of doing something new, technology broadly-defined should rightfully consider technology that is mid-life or old.
Many of the coolest stories in business shine a light on this misunderstood area. There are vulture funds that pick up the assets of distressed companies and refurbish the “old” company into something new. There are entrepreneurs that buy old, depreciated assets at bargain-basement prices and in the process net high percentage returns on the asset they got for cheap. There is a company in my region that tried to close down their business, held an auction to unload their old equipment, and discovered that auctioning is an incredibly lucrative business to get into.
But those stories are a little too sexy; let’s get back to drudgery. It turns out that a large number of engineers and computer programmers are devoted to maintaining something that has already been created. In addition, maintenance workers are often paid less than those who are closest to ribbon-cutting ceremonies, IPOs, and product launches.
Workforce Management and the Maintenance of Human Capital
The connection to human resources is that people are trying to articulate how we should think of employees as “human capital.” The phrase itself invokes a metaphor that the people who show up every day are a treasure that you invest in and get great work out of. Perhaps we should extend the metaphor into the importance of human capital maintenance. Do we have opportunities to conserve, re-build, renovate, and polish-up our pre-existing cadre of staff? If you think about it for a while, examples abound:
- When employees are injured, there is significant value to intervening early to help them stay at work or return to work sooner. The “return to work” field is a specialized field which has a knack to it, and major employers take these efforts seriously.
- It is well understood that new hires have higher engagement than longer-serving staff. By default, the implication is that if you want to improve engagement, your greatest opportunity is with longer-service staff. At the crux of workforce analytics and employee engagement is the opportunity to refresh the workplace experience of those hired long ago.
- In the c-suite, there is the recurring challenge that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” (Drucker) However, it is understood that workplace culture changes very slowly. This tension implies that those who want to advance a strategy must have significant understanding of the longer-serving staff who carry the workplace culture. Perhaps looking to the wisdom of longer-serving staff is an easier way to predict which initiatives will take hold in the pre-existing culture?
- When attempting workforce analytics and workforce planning efforts that align to strategy, stale strategy documents and longer-serving executives can be your only opportunity for alignment. New executives and new strategy documents can have a long runway, in some cases with a perpetual churn.
- Long-serving staff tend to learn a number of shortcuts that allow them to achieve their work goals more easily. This grab-bag of quick-tips, tacit knowledge, and mature social networks are a troublesome source of high productivity. Workplaces fear the retirement of long-service employees who understand the physical and organizational machinery in a manner that is undocumented. In such cases there is a demand for knowledge management, the active cultivation of repositories of information where tacit knowledge is curated and transferred between newer and longer-serving staff.
- As millennials age, our struggles to understand this generation are going to shift. It’s not so much that we don’t know what they’re thinking (they tend to just tell us). Rather, what will their experience be as millennial managers, dealing with the next batch of young whipper-snappers in Generation Z? This multi-generational transfer of energy and wisdom will demand a workplace culture of humility and curiosity. Workplace traditions can emerge in just a couple of years, and can evolve around the behaviors of employees young and old. Yet it is not so much the best perspective that matters; it is the ability to move a diversity of perspectives amongst peers.
As the shine comes off workforce planning and workplace analytics as a novelty, we are obliged to take our practice into a mode where great work is done quietly, well, and with a known value. As we look at the legacy of buzzwords that came before us and the shiny new practices to come, there is a new opportunity to understand the boundary between engineering drawings, breaking the ground, and replacing broken parts. Cultivating and maintaining people, their knowledge, their relationships, and the workplace culture are key to delivering strategy. There is an opportunity for your employees to age gracefully and keep delivering the goods.
Stuart Murray Speaks 