Executive Briefings

Published January 2010

The New Workplace Mantra: 'Do It Yourself'

Agatha Gilmore

According to new research from Novita, a talent recruiting and development services firm, 71 percent of organizations surveyed are now doing more tasks in-house than before the economic recession. The main reason? A smaller budget, according to 85 percent of respondents.

“Over the last year and a half, we’ve certainly noticed [with] clients and potential clients [that] either the project got pulled or the budget ran out,” said Robert Bilotti, managing director at Novita. “Rather than hiring additional head count, their boss or they are taking it on themselves.”

Of the 8 percent who said they were actually doing less themselves these days, more than 40 percent said it was due to a lack of relevant skills in their workforces, while 26 percent said they just didn’t have the time.

However, while it may currently be a response to a tough financial climate, this DIY attitude isn’t likely to go away anytime soon, Bilotti said.

“I think what we’re seeing here is not a temporary reaction, but a complete paradigm shift,” he said. “Another question we asked [in the survey] was, ‘When and if the economy recovers, will you go back to the way it used to be?’ A third of them said they would not; almost half said, ‘I’ll change my approach, but not back to how things used to be.’ [But] frankly, people getting back to basics is good. I think having a stripped-down approach is not always a bad thing.”

In fact, there are several major benefits to this in-house approach. In some cases, the knowledge and skill the learning organization is looking for can be found within the company. By finding and extracting it, learning executives are providing additional opportunities for employee development and potentially increasing engagement — all while being kind to the bottom line. They also have more control over projects brought in-house.

According to one survey respondent, “Internal takes longer, but is more stable and all-encompassing. External is quicker, but eventually we need to bring projects in-house, so where is the savings?”

That said, there are several potential pitfalls to the DIY approach that learning executives must weigh carefully. Quality is one issue, while available time is another, Bilotti said. Further, sometimes even though they have the relevant knowledge, skills and learning internally, organizations still need help delivering it.

“I think what a lot of organizations do is either nothing, or they throw it on their intranet. It’s sitting somewhere and it’s not delivered effectively,” Bilotti said.

For this reason, some solutions providers, including Novita, are adopting a new service model whereby they offer training for learning executives on how to “do it yourself.”

“[For example], for our on-boarding services, we used to offer basically just the full service: In other words, we’ll come in and do everything,” Bilotti said. “Now what we do is offer what we call Springboard, which is a boot camp. We will train the organization how to do it themselves.”

Agatha Gilmore is a senior editor for Chief Learning Officer magazine. She can be reached at agilmore@clomedia.com .

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