Mark Salsbury, in "Human Capital Management: Leveraging Your Workforce for a Competitive Advantage" wrote "...while extraordinary products and unique services still afford a competitive advantage, the one advantage that stands the test of time...is people.”
I found this to be true when I was working in the Human Resources Department of a government agency and after it was taken over by a government-linked company.
As the agency prepared its people for the move to a company, every employee except those who will remain in the public sector was to be pensioned off. I was assigned this task including dealing with the federal pension department. Time was short. There were tons of paperwork. Employee particulars had to be entered, checked and rechecked before the final copies were prepared and signed. Options had to be prepared, checked and rechecked and signed. I had to rope in a lot of people to get things done within the stipulated time.
The people in the team were fantastic. My main task was to coordinate things and to ensure everything was completed on time, to carry out the final checking and to ensure they had their meals and transport home. The help of security personnel had to be arranged, too. And when the documents were already at the federal pension department, I had to send people to help process the papers on time for the agency's privatisation.
Everything went according to plan. If not for the people who did the major part of the job, it would have been impossible to complete everything on time.
Organizational systems and processes may come and go depending on whether these are still needed or not. But it's people who have to use or make these work for the purposes they were made. Surely, non-performing people will have to leave. Good people will continue to perform well provided they are properly looked after. If not, they will leave.
At one time, I advised a head of a subsidiary company that he had to look for ways to ensure that a certain employee remain in service. The failure to do so inevitably made the employee go. The rest of his workforce had to struggle. Not long after that, the subsidiary was closed down and its employees distributed among sister companies.
Indeed, to me, what Mark Salisbury wrote rings true.
