Round up of the Crucial Debates, Part 1

On the 16^th and 17^th of March the Institute of People Management ran the first of a new kind of offering at the Midrand Conference Centre. The Crucial Debate Series asks the questions you should be asking in your workplace, and aims to influence what we do and how we do it. We throw critical and crucial issues at you to spur thinking and action. We covered the days in a live tweet feed through our Twitter account, @IPM4Poeple, using the hashtag #IPMCD. We’re going to capture a few of the provocations from the days and present them to you here.

What do you have to say? What are you going to do?

Fit pay for the job

 Did you know that there is a 33% differential between male and female pay in South Africa? What do we do about this?

Here is a challenge that Jonathan Goldberg, CEO of Global Business Solutions and Labour Analyst, threw to the audience:

You have two employees, one male, and one female. They both do the same job. The man gets R20K per month more than the woman. How do you to address this? What is fair? What’s the right thing to do?

Did you answer pay the woman the same as the man? Most of us did.

How about this course of action: your starting point should be to ask yourself, what is the correct salary for this job? Establish the real value and the fit pay for the job, and make your decisions. This approach takes the longer-term sustainability of the organisation into account, which in this competitive and squeezed context is key.

Benefits that are valued

Johnny also challenges us to think carefully about our benefits and which ones are really key to retaining and motivating staff. Ask yourself, what benefits do our employees really value? Are there benefits that they do not value? It’s no good offering what your employees do not want, but sometimes we do this anyway. Get in touch with what makes the biggest difference, and genuinely try to shape what you offer.

Plan B

Are you planning ahead? Ideally, we should be in touch with what’s going on, and ensure that real workplace issues are heard. If we are not, strikes are likely to be on the horizon. Companies must think about alternative plans that mitigate for the knock on effects.

In view of possible strikes, ask yourself, what is our plan B? How can we manage with least disruption? How will our customers or suppliers be affected? What alternatives do we have for managing some of the disruption?

Home grown

One last point from this guru Goldberg, grow your own people. Mercedes Benz is renowned for doing this and it shows.

Tweets:

If you home grow people into leadership positions, they have the skill and culture of the organisation. #IPMCD #leaders

We have to unlock the potential of our people. #IPMCD says @JGoldbergsnr

Would you like to access the tweet feed from the event? We have used a tool called Storify to aggregate the tweets into one place for you. To access the Crucial Debates Storify, click here.

What do you have to say? What are you going to do?

In our next blog we’ll cover more provocations from the two days. In the meantime please give us your thoughts.

Would like to put your name down to attend the next Crucial Debate event? Members benefit from a discount on the fee.

Would like to speak at our next event, offering your provocations to our HR, L&D and Business Leader Audience?

Email us on: media@davestatelite.co.za