Tag: quotes

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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.

 

 

Categories
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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Customer service Marketing Training & Development

What Do You Notice About These Three Customer Service Stories?

In honor of National Customer Service Week (observed the first week in October), here are three amazing stories told by customers — all marketing professionals — who experienced and analyzed them. They represent different situations that share a common theme.

Customer experience #1:

“I walked into an Eckerd Drug Store to buy a sympathy card. Before the clerk even rang up the purchase, he took a silk rose from a display at the counter, presented it to me, and said, ‘I’m sorry for your loss. I hope this will cheer you up a little.'” Toby Bloomberg

Toby’s takeaway: “There were no dramatic gestures, no casts of thousands, no high cost involved. Simply an elegant approach to ‘service’ between two people. And when you get right down to basics, isn’t that what “legendary service” is all about — people who go the extra mile to connect to the customer?”

Customer experience #2:

“It was a Saturday around noon at the Hyatt Woodfield hotel in Chicago for an American Marketing Association chapter leadership meeting. Just as our people were sitting down to lunch, the first alarm went off. We were quickly hustled outside by the staff and stayed outdoors for the better part of an hour due to a water emergency.

“A couple of weddings were scheduled to take place at the hotel later that day. One of the brides arrived that morning and, not finding a closet hook high enough to hold her wedding gown off the floor, she hung it on a fire system water sprinkler. The weight eventually broke the sprinkler head, spewing rusty water all over the gown in her room and other rooms on the floor that were linked on that sprinkler water line. The water also leaked through to rooms below the bride’s floor. The hotel could have easily blamed the bride for her misfortune and the inconvenience caused to everyone else in the hotel. But instead they summoned a limousine, took the bride and her mother across to the Nordstrom’s at Woodfield Mall to buy a new dress.” Chris Bonney

Chris’s takeaway: “I don’t know if the hotel was insured for this kind of thing or not. But they knew that it was cheaper for the bride to get a new dress so that her wedding could proceed and worry about the details later. They recovered the situation without embarrassing the bride and her family.”

Customer experience #3:

“My husband and I were traveling to Boston to attend a conference for his work when I had a medical emergency on the plane. Upon landing at the airport, I was immediately taken off the plane in a special ambulance gurney and transported to the hospital. While filling out our medical forms in the ER, my husband and I suddenly looked at each other to ask, “What happened to our luggage?!” since we left the plane in such a hurry.

“While I was in surgery, my husband took a taxi to the conference hotel and explained our situation. The Marriott Copley Hotel front desk clerk called the airport to find and hold our luggage. The hotel also arranged for a staff member to drive my husband back to the airport to collect the luggage, drop him off at the hospital to be with me after surgery, and place our luggage in the hotel room for when my husband returned.” This is my customer service story.

Here’s my takeaway: “In our situation, we were guests who arrived at the hotel with a problem that had nothing to do with the hotel itself. Yet the front desk staff showed their compassion and concern by going the extra step take care of us.”

What these stories share

My colleagues and I had different customer experiences with a common theme: demonstrations of exemplary service by employees who were empathetic and responsive to their customers — all in situations where the service provider did nothing wrong. Nonetheless, front line employees went “above and beyond” to do everything right.

What’s equally impressive is that these experiences took place more than 25 years ago. Extraordinary customer service — good and bad — leaves a lasting impression.

Categories
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

“Protect People From Too Much Organization”

The yellowing, decades-old piece of paper I found in my files featured this striking advice from Zoltan Merszei, former executive at Occidental Petroleum Corporation and Dow Chemical Company. Merszei wrote it “as a reminder that we need to protect people from too much organization, while never destroying the organization itself.” His message is still relevant:

  1. Always have too few people. Always.
  2. Judge people carefully; if you choose well, everything becomes easier.
  3. Seek changes in business; don’t just accept change.
  4. Make sure decision making is centered where the action is.
  5. Remember that organization follows ability, not the other way around.
  6. Fit your organization to people, not people to the organization.
  7. Learn from the past, but invest in the future.
  8. Don’t just accept responsibility — usurp it.
  9. Don’t hope for excellence — demand it, of yourself and others.
  10. Develop a vision of what’s to come in this world. That’s your ultimate insurance of success.
    — reprinted from the March-April 1980 newsletter, “Oxy: The Occidental Report.”

So much has changed in business since it was written, and yet so much hasn’t. Effectively managing people and the organization they support continues to be a challenge.

 

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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!”

Categories
Engagement

Engaging Conversations with Volunteers

“Volunteers … work not for money but because they want to give back, make a difference, change the world.”  Sally Helgesen

While the need to give of themselves may motivate volunteers to get involved, it doesn’t ensure their continuing commitment. What keeps them involved is the quality of their experience with an organization.

The best way to understand your volunteers’ experience is to engage them in conversation. This can be done in individual conversations or, if you manage a large group of volunteers, through roundtable discussions or surveys.

Engaging conversation starters

Ask these key questions to learn what your volunteers think – and how they feel – about your nonprofit:

• What is it about this organization that appealed to you to get involved?

• What about this organization keeps you involved?

• What do you expect to give and get from your volunteer involvement?

• What do you enjoy most about your volunteer experience?

• What suggestions do you have to improve the volunteer experience?

• Would you recommend this organization to other volunteers?

What to do with volunteer feedback

Listen carefully and acknowledge your volunteers’ value – both in serving your organization and in sharing their thoughts with you. Collective responses to the first four questions provide important insight to reinforce volunteer engagement and may be used in your messaging to recruit new volunteers.

Responses to the last two questions will help you identify concerns that need immediate fixing and those that need to be addressed in the long term. Share and communicate any follow up to let your volunteers know that you heard them.

Volunteers are precious resources. Listen to them and treat them with the respect they deserve.