Streamline Training & Documentation: Jeffrey Pfeffer is Back from Korea

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Jeffrey Pfeffer is Back from Korea

In a column in the August issue of Business 2.0, Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, reports on what he learned during a recent trip to Korea.¹

In the aftermath of a financial crisis in 1997, Korea experienced serious unemployment. Those workers who were employed often put in 50 and 60 hours on-the-job a week.

The Korea Labor Institute (KLI), a government-sponsored research body, began a series of projects aimed at helping combat the unemployment while also promoting employee welfare. In March 2004, KLI established a research and consulting organization called the New Paradigm Center (NPC), with a view to

introducing a 'new paradigm' in the national economy, which will contribute to creating sustainable jobs and increasing business competitiveness, by introducing [a] lifelong learning system and strengthening industrial safety.

It is NPC that Pfeffer offers as a model for government intervention to support businesses' adjustment to trends in the global economy.

NPC has "a mandate to study, consult on, and promote people-centered management practices, primarily in small and medium-size enterprises." The steps NPC encourages companies to take include "investing in employee training, team building, reducing work hours, increasing organizational trust, raising the level of employee satisfaction and engagement, and improving communication so employees understand their company's goals and precisely what is expected of them."

Pfeffer reports good results from NPC's work, which now has involved about 170 companies:

Sales are up an average of 7%.

Profits are up an average of 26%.

Quality of products and services is up an average of about 60%.

There have been marked improvements in on-the-job safety.

NPC strongly encourages companies to devote substantial time and money to learning. Pfeffer reports that "NPC's client companies ... more than doubled the number of hours spent on training and invested nearly 50 percent more in learning and education."

Pfeffer's concluding thought is that the US could learn something from Korea when it comes to helping companies be more effective in how they use their human resources and in the processes and practices they adopt as they seek to strengthen their market positions. (For an example of what Korean companies are learning from their US counterparts, see this earlier post.)
__________

¹ Note that The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action, co-authored by Jeffrey Pfeffer with Robert I. Sutton, is one of Streamline's suggested readings.

###

Labels: Learning organization, Management practices, Productivity

<< Home