Tag: employee engagement

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Engagement

Random Acts of Acknowledgment

“What a good helper you are!” my mother would say to a young child carefully handing boxes of cereal from the grocery shopping cart to be placed on the check-out counter. I’ll never forget the smiles on the child’s and parents’ faces when my mother would compliment them.

Similarly, smiling at the cashier and fellow customers while standing in line at the drug store … making polite conversation in an office lobby … sincerely complimenting a person’s hairstyle or shoes … these efforts take little time and energy, yet have tremendous impact.

According to research, engaging with and acknowledging others can actually benefit our health.

“People who engaged in simple pro-social behaviors with ‘weak ties’ — coworkers they didn’t know well, people in their fitness class, and so on — reported less loneliness and isolation and a higher level of happiness and well-being than people who avoided unnecessary conversation.” Scott Berinato, excerpt from a special HBR series about connecting at work.

We need such random acts of acknowledgment more than ever.

“At a time of vast and troubling uncertainty, in a world that is being reshaped by technology, small acts of connection take on outsized importance. It’s strange to think that a winning smile from a cashier or a flight attendant, or a nod of recognition from an employee who has seen you three times that week, might matter to the person receiving it — or to the person doing it. But … it does matter, both in terms of creating better human experiences and building more valuable organizations.” William C. Taylor, excerpt from an HBR article.

Positively acknowledging/connecting/engaging others – what a simple, powerful way to make a better workplace, community, and world.

 

 

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Engagement Training & Development

Engaging Workplace Wisdom — Tips on What Works to Engage Others

While I typically speak about employee/volunteer engagement with people currently active in the workforce, the prospect of being with an audience of retirees was too good to pass up.

My recent session for Penn State Lehigh Valley’s SAGE Lecture Series was designed with a dual purpose: 1) share the current state of workplace engagement and 2) tap into the rich reservoir of the audience’s job experiences to be shared with students. Twenty-six students also participated as part of their Intercultural Community-Building class – a first-year experience course that introduces students “to the concepts of identity and multiculturalism, and encourage them to engage in interactive discussions with others,” according to Kristy Weidner Hove, instructor and Institutional Planning Coordinator at Lehigh Valley Penn State.

After discussing the importance of engagement and what leads people to engage or disengage on the job, the audience broke into small groups of retirees and students to share their experiences in the workplace. Each breakout group then identified and shared their top three tips on engaging employees, volunteers, and co-workers.

Here are the resulting tips, compiled and organized by Kristy Hove, that reflect a variety of leadership, management, and collaborative practices based on actual experience.

TOP TIPS ON WHAT WORKS TO ENGAGE PEOPLE
AS EMPLOYEES, VOLUNTEERS, AND COWORKERS
Penn State Lehigh Valley SAGE Workshop

LISTEN

  • Don’t just hear what others have to say but listen to them and retain what they say.
  • At all levels, the person must be able to listen as a sign of respect.

COMMUNICATE

  • Respond to others in a way that indicates you understand them.
  • Communicate among each other and comment whenever the person did well.
  • Find a way that works to communicate with the group; i.e., face-to-face or online.

ACKNOWLEDGE AND REWARD

  • Acknowledge people at all levels, both intrinsically and concrete incentives.
  • Give credit to the person who comes up with the idea; mention his or her name in front of the group or boss.
  • Create an environment for recognizing and rewarding achievement.

KNOW NAMES AND ROLES

  • Learn people’s names.
  • For new employees or volunteers, ask the people they’ll be working with to introduce themselves and what they do.

BE ACCOMMODATING

  • Ask volunteers what they’d like to do. Explain you’ll try to accommodate if you can. Leaders need to be prepared for alternative, unexpected requests.

INSPIRE TEAMWORK

  • Team work makes the dream work.
  • Group activities and communication help with teamwork.

CREATE A POSITIVE ENVIRONMENT

  • Create an environment where employees enjoy what they are doing.
  • Attitude – people will mirror what they see.

ENCOURAGE SOCIALIZATION

  • Recognize the value of socialization. Some groups value the “journey” and inclusion as much as achievement.
  • Provide opportunities for social introductions.
  • Social gatherings can help with comfortability/familiarity .
  • Encourage openness among employees.
  • Find a friend at work.

PAY RESPECT

  • Show sincere respect and interest in people.
  • Management should maintain distance and yet be open to employees and their ideas.
  • Recognize abilities and limitations of the employees.
  • Act responsibly.
  • Treat everyone equally (Golden Rule).

Special thanks to Diane McAloon, Community & Alumni Outreach, and Kristy Hove for helping with this special workshop, and to all retirees and students for their active participation.

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Engagement

Who is Actually Responsible for Workplace Engagement?

Need to create an engaged workplace? While workshops, webinars, and articles abound on the subject, it takes more than just buying into the value and practice of engagement to be effective. It’s also important to understand who is actually responsible for engagement in the workplace.

Engagement is a responsibility shared by both employees and employers:

  • Employees are responsible for their own engagement in that they need to show up on the job ready, willing, and able to do their best work, and
  • Employers are responsible for creating and maintaining an engaging workplace where employees want to and are enabled to do their best work.

This responsibility also involves choice. Here is what several thought leaders say on the subject.

Quotes on individual employee engagement

“You are the boss of you. That means you get to decide/choose what your attitude is and how you react. Choose wisely.” Alexandria Trusov

“…you have to want to be engaged. There has to be deep-seated desire in your heart and mind to participate, to be involved, and to make a difference. If the desire isn’t there, no person or book can plant it within you.” Timothy R. Clark

“Wellbeing at work is based on our intentions, actions, and connections. It is not an employer program, policy, or work perk. What are you waiting for? Walk through the door and let work make you well.” David Zinger

Quotes on employer engagement

“Working to create a positive culture where people choose to join, stay, develop and perform is part & parcel of any HRD or CEO agenda.” Tony Jackson

“On what high-performing companies should be striving to create: a great place for great people to do great work.” – Marilyn Carlson Nelson

“Engagement will happen if and when an organization sees engagement as something done WITH people, not something done TO people.” Paul Hebert

Quotes on the employee-employer engagement relationship

“When employees feel that the company takes their interest to heart, then the employees will take company interests to heart.” Dr. Noelle Nelson

“Employees who believe that management is concerned about them as a whole person – not just as an employee – are more productive, more satisfied, more fulfilled. Satisfied employees mean satisfied customers, which leads to profitability.” Anne M. Mulcahy

“If the employees come first, then they’re happy. A motivated employee treats the customer well. The customer is happy so they keep coming back, which pleases the shareholders. It’s not one of the enduring green mysteries of all time, it is just the way it works.” Herb Kelleher

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Engagement Marketing

Can You Treat Customers Like Employees and Employees Like Customers?

Curiosity. A hunger to explore what works and what doesn’t. Respectively challenging others’ ideas. These are among the many reasons I enjoy speaking with groups of young adults preparing for leadership roles.

I recall one such gathering that involved an open discussion on marketing. We talked about dealing with difficult customers (it’s OK to terminate a relationship with customers when there’s no longer a good fit) and engaging employees with internal marketing (how to apply marketing inside a company to educate, motivate, and engage employees to deliver the brand promise).

“Excuse me,” asked one of the attendees, “but I think you have it backwards. You talk about ‘firing’ customers as if they are employees, and you also talk about ‘marketing’ to employees as if they are customers? How can this be?”

An excellent question … and one whose answer is based on understanding customers’ and employees’ respective roles and their value to a business and each other.

Customers pay for a firm’s products/services, which means they contribute the revenue that helps pay employee salaries. No customers =  no operating income = no business = no employees.

Employees serve customers by providing the products/services offered by the firm. No employees = no business to compete in the market = no customers.

A company needs to apply both marketing and management strategies to developing positive, loyal relationships with employees and customers so it can:

  1. attract, engage, and retain the right employees who are competent and committed to serving customers, and
  2. attract, engage, and retain the right customers whose needs will be best and profitably served by employees.

The takeaway: Yes, you can market to employees and you can manage customers. Done effectively, you’ll be able to work with the best of both.

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Engagement

Where You Lead From Makes a Difference

My recent post about Zoltan Merszei‘s message on organizational strategy included developing a “vision of what’s to come” as “the ultimate insurance of success.”

Articulating and sharing a well thought out vision certainly contributes to success, but it’s not enough. It also takes a leader who knows how to effectively engage and connect employees with the leader’s vision.

Professor Emeritus Stephen W. Brown, former director of Arizona State University’s Center for Services Leadership, describes this type of leader as one “who leads from the front, not the top.”

“Too often in traditional hierarchical organizations, the people who make the product never see the people ‘upstairs’ who manage. They can’t feel the passion of their leaders, understand their commitment to quality, or see their dreams for excellence because they’re not visible.”

I experienced such a leader earlier in my career. In my first job with a regional bank, the president, who came from outside the community, led from the top. He maintained an office on the sixth floor of the main headquarters/branch and was rarely seen by front line and operational employees. His contact with corporate customers took place mainly in executive offices and country clubs.

So it was culture shock for me when I changed employers to work at another regional bank whose president was much more visible. His office was on the second floor of the bank’s HQs, just off the escalator from the main branch lobby, where he was accessible to all customers and employees. He was also a major presence at all-employee meetings and social events. As a former teller who worked his way up to become bank president, he loved the bank, and his passion for the bank’s brand was contagious. This was an executive who led from the front.

You might think that the difference between these two CEO’s backgrounds — outsider vs. insider — might account for their different leadership styles. That was my thinking until I moved to a third regional bank where the president also had started as a teller, yet he led from the top. So being “home-grown” wasn’t the common denominator for leadership style.

All three CEO’s were professional and respected; all three banks were successful. Among all the banks, the most engaged and engaging corporate culture belonged to the second bank. It was also the most exhilarating and satisfying organization I ever worked in — all because I was caught up in the vision and success of a CEO and management team who led from the front.

 

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Engagement

Color Me Insulted: A Failed Attempt at Engagement

Picture this: a well-known brokerage firm recovering from a major scandal is faced with increasing losses and decreasing brand confidence. A well-intentioned attempt to rally its “dispirited” employees backfires and results in further disengagement.

Here’s the true and sad story as told to me recently by a former employee.

“I remember sitting at my mahogany desk in the summer of 1987 worried about what might happen. Working for E.F. Hutton meant I was at an elite firm and my desk was one of many amenities.

E. F. Hutton had gone through its share of travails, one of which was its check-kiting scandal. I was working in a branch office that was one of the biggest offenders. I had been hired right after the employees involved had been let go. Because of these offenses, our office was audited extensively: four times a year by the SEC, and about the same amount annually in internal audits.

We had been working hard to turn the company around, and as far as our branch could be considered, we were procedurally whistle-clean. The clients were loyal and the money was still coming in.

However, because of these and other problems, the company as a whole was not doing well. Losses were mounting and the stock was taking a hit on the NYSE. All E.F. Hutton employees were holding their collective breath about what sort of message we would get from management concerning the future of the company. We waited for a message, and waited, and waited.

Finally, after a week or more of waiting, we received something. A large package came from corporate headquarters. Inside the package for each employee was a coloring book and a small box of crayons.

The book was a very simplistic children’s story saying we were no longer the nicest house on the block and we all needed to work together to defeat our rivals and make our place nicer. The message was insulting and, to me, insinuated that the employees were only able to understand a message written for a 1st grader. This was sent to all 18,000+ employees including brokers that had taken an exhaustive 6-hour long test to become a stock broker, as well as operational employees who knew the ins and outs of a complex financial industry. Employees at the main office New York City had been in the industry working at that level for 20 years or more.

Within an hour, the trashcans were full of the books. Some employees took the crayons home for their children, clearly feeling that the crayons were the only valuable item they had received.

Soon after the company was sold to Shearson Lehman.”

Both the medium and the message of the Hutton Coloring Book failed. Employees can handle bad news IF leadership is honest and respectful in communicating what happened, what corrective measures are in place as a result, and what will be needed moving forward.

A once powerful brand (“When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen”), E.F. Hutton also serves as an example of what NOT to do in engaging employees.

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Engagement Training & Development

Can You Afford to Fuel Employee Burnout?

[Note: This post first appeared on myHR Blog and is shared with permission from Tina Hamilton, PHR, founder of myHRPartner, an HR outsourcing firm. Tina is a well-respected business professional who is frequently quoted in the national media on HR-related issues in the workplace, and I’m proud to know her as a colleague and friend. To learn more about her work, please visit myHRPartner.]

Is employee burnout hurting your bottom line? via myHR Blog

Just like a broken down car, a burned out workforce will not take your business where it needs to go. And as much as some people would like to paint employee burnout as completely based in personal issues, it is more often than not a sign of serious organizational problems within a company.

What’s more, employers who don’t recognize and correct the kinds of workplace problems that lead to burnout risk hurting their company’s bottom line. Things like very heavy workloads, feelings of job insecurity, frustrations with massive amounts of meetings and impossible deadlines fraught with roadblocks create a toxic workplace environment where employees feel frustrated and stressed out.

According to a recent Harvard Business Review article, employee burnout costs an estimated $125 billion to $190 billion in American healthcare spending on psychological and physical problems it causes each year. But the real cost to businesses can be far greater because of issues such as low productivity and high turnover rates as great employees leave toxic environments for greener pastures.

When Harvard Business Review looked inside companies with high burnout rates, they found these common problems:

We saw three common culprits: excessive collaboration, weak time management disciplines, and a tendency to overload the most capable with too much work. These forces not only rob employees of time to concentrate on completing complex tasks or for idea generation, they also crunch the downtime that is necessary for restoration.

Excessive collaboration may prevent progress

Poor time management practices and overloading top performers are issues that are fairly obvious causes of employee burnout. Excessive collaboration, on the other hand, may seem counter-intuitive on its face. The article explains that this situation arises when teams have too many decision makers and too many decision-making steps. “This can happen in companies that really do mean well,” says Tina Hamilton, PHR, myHR Partner president. Going overboard on collaboration often leads to a cycle of endless meetings, hordes of emails and scheduling nightmares—all without significantly moving a project forward. “Stress can lead to personality clashes and get in the way of pragmatic, timely decision making and progress. You can see how this can lead to burnout.”

This being said, collaboration itself—when done right—is often a great thing for work teams. Hamilton recommends having a clear strategy and sensible team organization before collaborative projects begin in order to decrease frustration and to keep things from getting bogged down with meetings, emails and red tape.

Other causes of employee burnout mentioned in the article include:

  • The new “always-on digital workplace”
  • Constant multitasking that leads to exhaustion and lack of focus on any one task
  • Rigid approaches to team objectives that do not allow for re-prioritizing when new tasks are added or outside situations change
  • Managers who do not know how much time employees spend on activities, meetings, etc.
  • Lack of tools and training for employees to handle tasks
  • A corporate culture in which overwork is expected or celebrated
  • A sense of lost autonomy among employees.

As we have blogged about in the past, the danger of overworking employees is real. They will feel disrespected or unappreciated, and they won’t stay—especially if they are talented. As an HR outsourcing company that often helps clients avoid expensive, time-sucking high employee turnover rates, we can tell you burnout will burn your company. It’s just a matter of time.

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Engagement

A Business Consultant’s Rant

I love working with my clients, and yet I get so frustrated sometimes — not at them, but for them. I get frustrated on their behalf because of the organizational absurdity they have to deal with. For example:

  • A management team focuses on improving employee and customer engagement despite inconsistent or no corporate support.
  • An executive director struggles to move forward with a board-approved strategic plan while lacking sufficient resources that include board member support. (The latter is well-meaning but complacent.)
  • A department head labors to accomplish departmental objectives with conflicting goals and multiple agendas as the top executive’s vision and those of the division heads exist on different planes.

These clients know what they need to do despite being hindered by misplaced priorities, misguided executives, and misaligned goals. So they persevere.

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” Theodore Roosevelt.

I care about and admire my clients, and I’ll do my best to help them succeed no matter what – even when it’s being a sounding board for them.

Unfortunately, there’s no magic solution for organizational lunacy. I just wish I had a supply of silver bullets they could bite.

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Engagement

What’s the Problem with the Next New Management Trend?

The answer depends on management’s attention span.

No matter how well intentioned, executives who are unable to keep their focus on doing what it takes to make a new approach work will move on when the initiative fails and go after for the next best thing — frustrating their employees in the process.

In this situation the latest greatest management trend might be new, but not the employees’ experience with it. So they shake their heads and roll their eyes – out of management’s sight – when executives launch their business strategy du jour to increase/improve:

  • innovation
  • productivity
  • engagement
  • collaboration
  • all, or any combination, of the above.

Employees are asked to ascend the roller-coaster of executives’ initial excitement, only to endure a steep drop in efforts to sustain the approach. Without sufficient investment in the necessary resources and follow-through, employees are left feeling cynical rather than invigorated.

Jumping on the management bandwagon isn’t the issue; what’s critical is how seriously a new approach is considered and applied. As Robert Bacal writes in his article, Management Fads – Things You Should Know:

“Because management fads do usually have substance, those who take the time to explore the possibilities usually come away from the experience as better managers. Those who do not take the time to learn, but adopt a management approach on only a superficial understanding of the techniques, become worse managers.”

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Engagement Training & Development

Here’s What Bad Bosses Say

Steer clear if someone you work for – or with – says any of the following:

“I’m not the boss because I’m always right. I’m always right because I’m the boss.”

“Why should I invest in your training? You’ll just take all this knowledge and go to work for someone else.”

“Lack of planning on my part will constitute a constant emergency on your part.” (Former boss mantra)

“You don’t need to know what this is for – just do what I tell you to do.”
Translation: “You’re paid to do, not to think.”

As Leah Arnold Smeets aptly puts it, “The bottom line is, bad managers are bad for business, and they’re even worse for their employees. That’s because no company or enterprise can win with disengaged employees drained of energy and enthusiasm.”

While many bad boss quotes and how to cope with them can be found online, here’s one of my favorites:

Boss: “It’s not my job to make my employees happy!”
Consultant: “It’s not your job to make them miserable either!”