"The times they are a-changin'"
Bob Dylan sang those words 44 years ago when the now 67-year-old minstrel was a young man writing about the radical upheavals of the 60s. Dylan's famous song went on to advise the then older generation in power that they could change as well–or get left behind. There's nothing radical about that. It has been thus and ever will be.
Recap
In two previous articles, Rethinking Organizational Loyalty and If Alliance is the New Loyalty [web links below], we discussed:
- The social and economic changes that began in the 1980s and how they shaped younger officers to hold a different view of loyalty than their predecessors, and
- How to tap into this new view to attract and retain the best of policing's future–and to get their best.
This month we'll take a look at how an organization that understands the forces of change is transforming the employer/employee relationship to meet the changing times and the changing workforce.
The New Work Compact
Under the old work contract, employees were given job security in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. Today's workforce is far more mobile and has multiple loyalties. They consider job hopping a normal path to professional growth and personal fulfillment (see The Forces of Change, condensed from a book by Carol Kinsey Goman, web link below).
American organizations in the private sector are adjusting to the changing times and workforce. They have to or they're competed out of existence. Partnership is replacing paternalism and alliances are replacing the time worn contract of traditional loyalty.
An example of how one company implemented this new compact is Royal Bank of Canada (RBC). RBC took a cross-section of their workforce for an offsite conference with the goal of drafting an outline for a mutually beneficial and effective partnership between the organization and its employees. The result was a new work compact.
Royal Bank of Canada promised to strive to provide employees:
- Training, learning and development opportunities
- Rewards, recognition and pay for their contribution
- Challenging job and growth opportunities
- Technology support
- Support for employability and marketability
- Support for personal and family needs
- Professional HR support
Employees promised to strive to provide RBC:
- Commitment to work, teamwork and customers
- Work skills in keeping with changing jobs
- Contribution focused on business objectives
- Personal ownership of development and growth
- Flexibility
- Effective people management
- Attitude
(see The new loyalty compact: organization-loyalty is reborn, also condensed from Goman's book, web link below).
How does this translate to policing?
We can all agree police departments have salary constraints that private businesses do not. So what? That doesn't excuse not rewarding and recognizing officers in other ways. And research into Gen X and Y workers show they want:
- Meaningful work that makes a difference to the world
- Working with committed co-workers who share their values
- Meeting their personal goals
- Full appreciation for work done
- Feeling they are in on things
- Sympathetic help with personnel problems
(see Mastering the ABCs of Organizations, John R. Throop, cited in Jim Clemmer's Beyond Manipulating and Motivating to Leading and Inspiring, web link below).
None of the above involves pay. And you don't have to have an in-house HR department to provide sympathetic help with personnel problems.
If you're in police management, perhaps you question the advisability of providing support for officers' marketability. If you do, you're not very confident about the desirability of working for your department. And if you think your department isn't a desirable place to work, you need to address those issues or officers will leave the agency anyway.
Police work demands and develops:
- Critical thinking
- Multitasking
- Written, verbal and non-verbal communication skills
- The capacity to prioritize
- Calmness under stress
These are high level work skills any employer would be glad to find. The police profession should be touting such skills as enhancing young officers' marketability in the work force. At the same time, policing must strive to be a profession in which a young officer finds it beneficial to spend a long and laudable career.
All of the other things RBC promised its employees are similarly within the ability of any police department to provide, if its leadership is committed to attracting and retaining officers in the changed times in which we live. This isn't to suggest that police departments adopt the RBC compact. That would leave out the most essential component of the new work compact–mutuality.
Departments need to develop their own compacts with their officers based on what each wants from and has to offer the other. Such compacts should become part of the recruiting and hiring process. They should also be part of job performance evaluations to ensure thedepartment is holding up its end.
Want day-to-day and long term commitment from the new generations of officers? Job security and a pay check won't get it. It's going to take a two-way street of alliance. Alliance is defined as:
A formal agreement between two or more parties to cooperate for specific purposes; a merging of efforts or interests by persons or organizations.
Royal Bank of Canada's mutual work compact is an innovative way to formulate and implement just such an agreement. And what higher purpose, what more meaningful work could there be than putting it on the line to protect and serve others?