When consumer electronics industry pioneer Motorola split
into two separate companies (Motorola Solutions and Motorola Mobility) in 2011,
it marked a turning point for its HR team in particular.
“We used it as an opportunity to relaunch our company with
respect to our purpose and values. That’s how our HR transformation started. We
translated our values into specific leadership capabilities in terms of how we
develop, interview, assess and manage people,” says Shelly Carlin, senior vice
president of HR for Motorola Solutions.
At the same time, Motorola Solutions wanted to change its
organisational culture and become more agile, so that it could react more
quickly and be innovative. As the organisation grew smaller after the
separation, another concern was how it was going to create development
opportunities for its workforce, says Carlin.
Eliminating performance ratings
One of the biggest steps that Motorola Solutions took towards
changing its culture was taking a different approach to performance management.
The company decided to eliminate its performance ratings system in 2012.
“The ratings created tension between the employee and
manager. Instead of a conversation about how an employee could improve and
grow, it became just about labels. Since it was so tightly linked to
compensation, employees weren’t listening to that conversation. They were just
waiting for the label because it would tell them what their compensation would
be,” explains Carlin.
Removing the label has helped managers to move from a
‘parent-child’ evaluation relationship to a ‘coaching’ relationship with
employees, says Carlin. The new system starts at the beginning of each year
where the manager and employees sign off on the goals that they have set for
the coming 12 months. By the end of the year, they have to acknowledge that a
conversation took place about those goals. There are no formal checkpoints. “We
have taken HR out of the policing of the process. Managers and employees should
always be having a dialogue about their performance.”
Motorola Solutions developed training materials for managers
to have better performance conversations.
The company also gave managers five simple questions to
structure these conversations around:
What has the employee done well?
What could the employee have done differently or better?
What are the skills that the employee needs to grow his or
her career?
How do the employee’s leadership behaviours measure up to
the Motorola Solutions leadership model?
Where does the employee stand relative stand relative to his
or her career with the company?
“The point of the questions is not to tell them which areas
they did well or didn’t. It is to engage them in a conversation to help them
discover how they did on their own. Our work in HR is to help managers get
better at coaching, rather than evaluating,” says Carlin.
The new performance management system is also more
efficient. It has reduced time spent on performance management by 50 to 75%,
says Carlin. Previously, there was a lot of ‘noise’ in the system due to
employees being dissatisfied with their performance labels and the rewards that
they were receiving, she says.
Response to the new system has been positive. “I’ve received
a lot of emails from employees and managers saying what a great change this was
because the old system was unproductive.”
However, Carlin cautions that although that the system has
worked for Motorola, it might not be right for everybody. “Don’t look at what
we did but look at the questions that we asked. Ask yourself: Is this driving
the culture that I want and is this contributing to business performance?”
Recruitment challenges
Motorola Solutions hired some 3,000 people globally in 2012.
Yet, competition is stiff in the technology industry, especially for roles in
software and systems engineering. “The challenge is to get better at finding
the talent that want to work for us. Everybody is recruiting the same scarce
talent,” says Carlin.
The next generation of recruiting and talent acquisition
specialists need to focus on candidates who appreciate the company’s value
proposition, instead of trying to be everything to everybody, Carlin says. This
requires companies to use data and analytics more precisely, so they can target
where the right people are. “We are also getting our message into the labour
market about what is it really like to work here and how we are different,” she
says.
Motorola Solutions is transitioning from being a
product-centric organisation to one that is focused on services and solutions,
and this too, is shaping its hiring strategy. “We are hiring not just to grow
but to change skill sets as we continue to redefine who we are,” Carlin says.
The hiring landscape is also changing rapidly, says Carlin.
“Getting a job today is very different from when we came into the workforce. We
are realigning our spend in the recruiting space to put more of a bet on social
media, because that’s where the candidates are.” Motorola Solutions is also
looking at ways to ensure that its brand remains consistent across different
platforms such mobile phones, tablets or websites.
“It is an exciting time for HR professional as we are seeing
a seachange in the skills and capabilities to be a great HR person.”
Building an innovative work culture
“The ability to create an innovative culture is only as good
as every single manager that you have in your firm,” says Carlin. It is the
manager who creates an environment where people collaborate and exchange ideas
freely, and where risk-taking is rewarded. “It is a rare manager who can create
that kind of environment but also hold people accountable to the end result. We
continue to upgrade our quality of managers so that they can create that
environment,” she says.
Motorola Solutions’ executive development programmes also
play a big role in cultivating this culture of innovation. The CEO Leadership
Forum for example, is a development framework for the company’s top 25
executives globally. The executives recently went through a full-year custom
designed learning programme where they had the opportunity to determine what
was needed to make the organisation successful in the future. “One of the first
things that they identified was changing our culture so that we become more
collaborative,” says Carlin.
Analysis by Motorola Solutions found that almost 40% of its
managers had a direct report who worked in a country outside their own. It was
determined therefore that technology should be a key driver of collaboration,
especially across borders. In line with this, Motorola Solutions implemented a
collaboration tool called ‘Jive’, which Carlin describes as “something between
Twitter and Facebook for enterprise”.
The company is also in the process of upgrading its
video-conferencing and Telepresence technologies so that the need for business
travel is reduced and employees can achieve better work-life balance.
Workplace diversity and inclusion
Motorola Solutions has a number of business councils that
were launched to create strong business links to diversity. Catering to
different interest groups, each council is formally structured with a
senior-level executive sponsor and top-management co-leaders. The main four
objectives for all of the business councils are marketing and brand awareness,
recruitment and retention, community involvement , and professional and
personal development. However, each council drives its own agenda as diversity
and inclusion issues vary across different geographies.
One of the most prominent among these is the women’s
business councils, says Carlin. These aim to help women in areas such as career
development, building of skills, and networking. In other regions the focus
areas include social responsibility and giving back to the community.
However, Carlin feels that the long term solution to
creating more inclusiveness at work is to look at the value that each
individual brings to the table, instead of focusing on how they look like or
where they come from. The key to this is to look at specific leadership
behaviours, she says. For example, what does leading change look like for a
senior manager, or an individual contributor? “This levels the playing field
and gives them a much fairer evaluation,” Carlin says.
