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One Question; INCREDIBLE Impact on Employee Engagement

It seems Einstein was correct about the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.

If you are in a leadership position you’ve no doubt come to realize that inspiring others to improve is not dissimilar to Einstein’s experiments with perhaps one notable exception: we seem to continually do the same thing over and over resigned to achieving the same results.

I read an article* today about Employee Engagement wherein they told a story about one software sales executive who asked his employees every week, “How happy are you at work this week and how can we make things better?” He said he could predict the next week’s sales based on the feedback received.

If you’re not in management, how does this question apply to you?

  • Ask yourself, “How happy are you at work and how can you make things better?”
  • Query your immediate supervisor, “How happy are you with my work and how can I improve’?
  • Ask co-workers, “Is there anything I can do that would help you with your work?”

Mind Map Fotolia_81225145Engagement is as much about listening as perhaps anything else. Listening begins with asking good questions. This question is among the best because it delivers a number of underlying messages:

  • We care about your happiness.
  • We want to know how we can make things better.
  • It’s up to you to tell us what you need.

Roots of “insanity”

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over expecting different results. – Albert Einstein

Getting the same results over and over start with the questions we pose. Our brains are problem-solving mechanisms and designed to answer whatever questions are posed.

If you have people reporting to you and you continually wonder, “What is WRONG with these people? Why can’t they just do what I ask of them?” your mind will come up with multiple answers (none of them pleasant) to those questions. If instead you think, “I know they want to do good work. What can I do to help them get there?” your mind will come up with multiple answers that are significantly more hopeful and productive. If you then ask each team member, “How happy are you at work this week and how can we make things better?” you will have not only your mind working on finding solutions but also multiple minds and that can only result in solutions for improvement.

Experiment – try something new

“How happy are you at work this week and how can we make things better?”

Stop what you’re doing for a moment and consider what a difference this question might make in your organization.

Your team knows what they need and they have good ideas. Why not create an environment where they can share them with you and with each other to support a team goal of improving the work, the organization and the team’s satisfaction?

Your challenge:  for the next three months carve out time every week to ask your team (or yourself) this question. Friday seems like a good day but that’s up to you. Watch what happens. Track what happens. See if there are tangible results in terms of productivity or accuracy. Look also for less measurable signs like employee morale and teamwork.

If you want to know what your team wants and needs to do their best work, try something new – ask them!

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How to Turn Your Employees into Partners

Do all your employees understand what they have to do with your Mission?

Mission as it relates to Employee EngagementI have often marveled at the endless hours and thousands of dollars an organization will spend on crafting a mission statement that even the CEO can’t recite from memory.

If you are an executive leader you should be able to recite the Mission Statement if woken up from a dead sleep and asked to do so. If you cannot, your organization is in deeper trouble than you can imagine.

Years ago I read Peak Performers, a book by Dr. Charles Garfield inspired by what he witnessed while working on the Apollo 11 mission to put a man on the moon. Garfield saw mediocre workers turn into extraordinary ones because the mission ignited them. He also saw them return to mediocrity when the mission was accomplished.

Intrigued, Garfield set about on his own 20-year mission: to discover what separates peak performers from everyone else. He found 6 unique characteristics. Today we will discuss the first:

THEY HAVE A MOTIVATING MISSION

What is your organization’s Mission? Don’t know? Look it up on the Internet. I’ll bet it’s there on your fancy website! Is that how your employees need to find it? Do they need to dig for it?

It is critical that every single one of your employees, you, and the Directors on your Board know the Mission Statement. Ideally, every meeting would start with a recitation of the Mission Statement. Every strategy and every project plan would clearly delineate how it helps to accomplish the Mission. Every company email would have the Mission Statement at the bottom. To quote master coach Tony Robbins, “Repetition is the mother of mastery.”

The Law of Attraction dictates that you get more of what you focus on. It is imperative that every team member is regularly focused on your Mission.

If you want more employee engagement, if you want your employees to partner with you the next step is for them to clearly identify and be able to articulate what role they play in achieving the Mission. Does the receptionist think he is only there to answer phones? Does the mailroom clerk think she’s only delivering mail? Or do they clearly understand, because it has been repeatedly reinforced, that without their contribution, the Mission could not be accomplished?

Although this would all work best if it were being modeled from the top down, it doesn’t need to be. If you are a manager or supervisor, you can begin this work in your own department. Start with your role and what it has to do with accomplishing the Mission. Then work with your team to identify the same for themselves. Then make the organization’s Mission central to your department’s culture. Make sure each team member understands that his or her contribution means something.

Apollo 11 from NASA websiteCountless hours and significant dollars were spent developing your company’s Mission Statement because it is important for every one on board to know what it is you are attempting to accomplish.

Remember the Apollo 11 Mission. Even if your company is not out to achieve something quite that exciting, what you do is important and when each team member fully understands his role in achieving it you will find Employee Engagement will increase.

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Keeping Your Top Talent from Walking Out the Door

You worked so hard to attract this talent. What are you doing to keep them?

Businessman Exiting Fotolia_102643428How many millions of dollars have been spent by organizations trying to retain the best of the best? Is it working in your company? While benefits and perks go a long way to keeping you competitive, in the end retention almost always boils down to employee engagement and that ALWAYS boils down to the individual’s immediate supervisor. I prefer the word “leader” to “supervisor” or “manager” but calling someone a leader doesn’t mean that she fills those shoes.

There have been entire books written about retention. I myself have devoted many blogs and live programs to the critically important roles that both good delegation and solid feedback play in keeping employees engaged and wanting to stay.

Today I want to focus on one important aspect of keeping your top talent from walking out the door.

You may consider it to be: Management Heresy

I call it the 80/20 Rule of Good Leadership.80-20-Principle

If you want to retain your top talent you must demonstrate to your team that performance counts. To accomplish this, it is imperative that you devote 80% of your leadership time to your top performers and only 20% to those who aren’t making the grade.

It’s counter-intuitive, isn’t it?

Not when you consider that you cannot teach someone something he doesn’t want to learn. Your low performers have undoubtedly been given many opportunities to improve. Maybe you have mentored them, sent them to classes and/or spent time putting them on performance improvement plans. All of that is required to give them the best opportunity to deliver the outcomes you need.

If, however, they are taking up the bulk of your attention at the expense of time spent with your top performers, it’s a recipe for trouble.

Your top performers have a much more significant impact on productivity levels

You would think that getting low performers to increase their results would improve productivity and the bottom line and it will—a little. Conversely, getting your top performers to increase their results will improve the bottom line—a lot!

Your top performers don’t need attention to do their jobs; you can almost always depend on them to get the job done under and any all circumstances. However, If you continually demonstrate that the way to get attention in your organization is to be a low performer, they are much more likely to walk out the door.

Existing jobs cannot compete with the allure of new promises from other companies unless your employees feel appreciated for the talent, skill and knowledge they bring to the table each day.

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HOW MUCH Does Employee Disengagement Cost?!?

ADP (the payroll giant) puts the cost of employee disengagement at an average of $2,634/year.  That’s an average. If your more highly paid employees are checked out then the cost increases dramatically. Since the 2014 Gallup Poll revealed that 70% of employees are disengaged, it means your organization could be bleeding money — and not slowly!

Where do these costs come from?

  • Low productivity
  • Lower sales
  • Missed opportunities
  • More down time in terms of illness
  • Increased use of medical and other employee benefits
  • Damage to your brand as unhappy employees bad mouth your organization

To quote Sonny & Cher from their hit song “And the Beat Goes On.”

 

Employee Engagement-What They Never Tell You

While it is important to create an environment in which employees have the freedom to be enthusiastic about their work, what no one ever says is:

You cannot engage others without their cooperation.

You can't make me - Fotolia_81408977You cannot force employee engagement. You can create the most amazing environment ever, one in which the leadership is open to input, provides meaningful and useful feedback, involves the staff in decision making and shares information that many businesses withhold. You can do all that and more—ping pong tables, complimentary massages, nap stations and gourmet food—and if some members of your team don’t want to be engaged, they won’t be. You can’t make them! If you do create that kind of environment, the good news is that those members of your team who are willing to be engaged will significantly increase their productivity.

Look at yourself. Are you engaged? Do you get excited about solving problems or making things work better? Do you think about how to do so even when you’re “off the clock?” I don’t mean, “Do you worry?” Worry is not engagement; worry is focusing on something you don’t think can be solved. Engagement happens when you are focused on potential solutions and when you are continually asking, “How could we do this better?” If you answered “no” to the previous questions, I will bet wads of money you are disengaged in your personal life, as well. And anything your employer does to engage you on the job will be a wasted effort.

The desire to engage comes from within and permeates every aspect of your life.

So how do you “fix” employees who refuse to engage? You can’t. The best you can do is ask them questions that might get them to tap into their own motivation. You may be skilled enough to do this, you might need support from your Human Resources department, or it could be worthwhile to engage the services of a Professional Coach.

If you want to increase your own level of engagement the most important question to ask yourself is,

Why do I come to work every day?

When I pose this question my programs someone inevitably jokes, “Because I like to eat” which, translates to, “I have to” which is a lie. There are plenty of people who decide not to work and suffer the consequences—they sleep on friends’ or parents’ couches or even become homeless. No one HAS to work and if you are working, it means that somewhere within you is a strong why; you’ve just forgotten what it is.

Your why doesn’t need to be about the work itself, it’s simply important that you know what it is. Ann Miller Circa 1920My grandmother’s cousin Annie loved to travel. Her entire life she would get a job, work really hard at it, put as much money away as possible, then quit and travel until her funds ran out. She was crystal clear why she worked—it made it possible to indulge her passion for travel. When she passed away, I was cleaning out her house and found her passport. It is one of my more cherished possessions.

If you’re waiting for someone else to somehow motivate you to become engaged in your own life, it’s going to be a very long wait. If you want work you enjoy so much that it gets you out of bed in the morning, then figure out your “why” and watch what happens!

Ann Miller Circa 1920

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