Points to Ponder on Your Internal Customers: Your People

Most organizations have “being customer focused” in their vision statements. Most common definition of customer is the one who pays for availing services. But those are external customers. The other part, and often a forgotten one, is that organizations have internal customers – the people who work with the organization.

Quality System means a chain of organization’s processes where output of one process acts as an input to another. Therefore, each process has an internal customer. Fundamental of quality system is – if your internal customers are not happy, your external customers will never be happy. Same applies to organizations as well – when they view employees as internal customers.

If you are a project manager, leader or a business owner, here are a few questions on your ‘internal customers: your people’ to ponder upon this Wednesday:

• Does the organization have a well-crafted feedback system where formal and informal feedbacks are shared with people periodically? (When people don’t receive feedback, they assume that they are doing the right job)
• Part of feedback process is to recognize that when people do a good job, they need to be recognized, acknowledged and praised. Does this happen often in your organization? (Signal: If you don’t see people being praised often, it is a problem signal)
• Do your internal leaders play a role of ‘human integration’ – organizing people around goals and fostering collaboration/teamwork?
• Are people held accountable for the quality of work they produce? Do they know the methods they can use to produce reasonably good quality? Are they sufficiently trained to do their job well?
• Do people have a clear visibility of organization’s vision and how their job contributes in a larger perspective?
• Do people have clear visibility on their 6-months and 1-year career growth plans with the organization?
• Are managers and leaders actively interested in seeing people develop and grow professionally? What are they doing about it?
• Do leaders treat people fairly in an unbiased fashion? Are your leaders consistent in their behaviors with all team members?
• Do people look up to their leaders as their competent role models? Do people respect their managers?
• Do your managers/leaders see people as competent professionals who have tremendous potential to grow? Are people treated as ‘humans’ and not just as ‘resources’? Are their strengths leveraged?
• For people who challenge the ‘status-quo’ – are they valued? Can people disagree with each other without any fear? Are people comfortable sharing their opinions at work?
• How often does senior leaders communicate with people at various levels in the organization?

I wrote this earlier – middle managers are a glue that binds the strategies at the top with actions at the bottom. Aligning middle management then should be one of the top priorities of business leaders.

Common perception is that ‘Human Resources’ team is responsible for managing human resources. Wrong! In fact, your middle managers manage your people, their work and their aspirations.

So, in essence, every project leader, project manager and senior leader is a human resource manager. Do they know this?

Photo Courtesy: Ice_Bird’s Flickr Photo Stream