Tag: strategy

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Engagement

Employee Engagement: When the Employee Just Doesn’t Feel It

Why is it that even in companies with a positive, engaged culture, there’s no guarantee all employees will be fully engaged?

The answer has to do with who’s ultimately responsible for employee engagement – a responsibility shared by employees and their employers.

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

So what happens when an employee doesn’t feel engaged in an engaging culture?

Barbara Berger, Career Wellness Partners
Barbara Berger, Career Wellness Partners

That’s what I asked Barbara Berger, hiring manager and certified career coach with Career Wellness Partners. Her mission is to expand the (often neglected) employee side of the employee engagement conversation by challenging individuals to take responsibility for their own motivation and career evolution. She has experience working with people in all stages of their careers: students, early professionals, mid-career job changes, and second acts.

According to Barbara, four primary situational factors contribute to employees no longer feeling engaged:

  • Poor job fit or career choice
  • Feeling they’ve outgrown their position within the company
  • Personal issues or life events, such as health or family crises, divorce, elder care responsibilities, etc.
  • Work is good, company is good, boss is intolerable.

QSM: What do you suggest to employees dealing with one or more of these situations?

Barbara: Speaking generally, regardless of the factor, an employee needs three things to return to engagement (or find engagement in the first place).

  1. Awareness – This means doing the self-assessment work to get to the root cause of the disconnect. This is the inward-facing, honest evaluation that begins to bring clarity to the situation. A hard look at strengths, skills, values, and interests, etc.
  2. Commitment – A commitment to doing whatever it takes to get back on the road to a connection with their career. It’s really a commitment to themselves that they won’t tolerate this level of disengagement and a promise to do their fair share of the work required to get it back on track.
  3. Action – Taking meaningful steps to create opportunities for change. Just thinking and complaining about the situation keeps employees in victim mode and on the sidelines rather than actively finding ways to inspire engagement for themselves.

QSM: In your experience, what else is involved in helping employees re-engage?

Barbara:  Each situational factor that impacts individual engagement brings its own considerations that are unique to the individual and his or her particular circumstances. When working with clients who fall into one of the above categories, there are things to take into consideration like:

  • The stage of career the employee is in
  • The level of commitment by the current company to fostering an atmosphere of engagement
  • The comfort level of having career development discussions with the boss (usually directly proportional to the company’s commitment cited above)
  • And, of course, the employee’s personal financial situation if considering making significant changes based on feeling disengaged.

It is when an employee is feeling disengaged that it can be most beneficial to take part in engagement opportunities the company provides. Even though it takes more energy at these times, I encourage disengaged clients to use everything available to create a spark of interest and create an atmosphere where transformational events can occur.

QSM: To learn more, please check out the Career Wellness Partners blog. Thank you, Barbara!

 

 

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Engagement

The Market’s Impact on Employee Engagement

How does the economy affect the practice of employee engagement?

In times of low unemployment when there is strong competition for qualified people to fill positions, organizations scramble to find and keep good employees. Strategic recruitment and retention take center stage in a tight labor market. In this situation, the case for employee engagement is a no-brainer.

In times of high unemployment when there are fewer positions available, it’s employees who scramble to find and keep jobs. Instead of being viewed as marketable talent (“What will it take to get you to work for us?”), employees are viewed as expendable commodities (“You’re lucky to have a job, so we don’t care about keeping you happy.”). This is when engagement is viewed as an unnecessary expense.

Investment in workplace engagement, unfortunately, varies based on the economy.

“In boom cycles, leaders tend to have a healthy focus on what needs to be done to continue to drive profitable growth. But as soon as the bubble bursts, they turn to an unhealthy focus on results, which decreases employee commitment [and] discretionary effort, and negatively impacts productivity, and overall market performance.” Dr. Clark Perry

We don’t need no stinkin’ engagement … or do we?

Market fluctuations should not be an excuse to abandon employee engagement efforts. For example, consider the impact that high unemployment has on consumer spending — when fewer people are working, they spend less. As a result, companies need to work harder to compete for customers. Employees who find themselves treated as expendable are unlikely to go out of their way to best serve current and prospective customers. It’s the reason I remind executives and business owners that the way your employees feel is the way your customers will feel. And if your employees don’t feel valued, neither will your customers!

It’s also why employee engagement is a smart strategy regardless of the market situation.

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Engagement

Favorite Quotes on Why Employee Engagement is Still a Challenge

“Employers, challenged by globalization, low productivity, wage pressure and talent shortages are not investing in people as they once did. They have gone from a traditional role of being builders of talent to consumers of work.” Jonas Prising, Human Age 2.0: Future Forces at Work

” … true employee engagement rests on building better leadership and approach to people. It’s not about picnics and awards.”  Deb Lavoy

“Why is demonstrating real respect and value for your employees so difficult? Maybe because it isn’t in the DNA of financially-focused CEOs and/or it’s not high in the list of outcome metrics for which they’re held accountable.” Bill McEwen

‘” … employees choose to engage when a company connects with them as human beings and not as resources.” Paul Hebert

“Enlightened employers know that committed and engaged employees are the critical resource for continuous innovation, effectiveness and productivity. They know that the people doing the actual work often know more than the people in the executive suite about what’s needed in order to succeed. Respect for employee flows from respect for their contributions.” Dr. Judith M. Bardwick

“The result of continually undermining employees’ efforts, particularly when they’re performing according to company standards, is increased employee frustration and disengagement.” Sybil F. Stershic

“People work just hard enough to not get fired, and companies pay employees just enough that they don’t quit.” Paul Kiewiet

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Marketing

Revisiting the Old “New Different” for Marketers

It’s been nearly seven years since I featured excerpts from Chris Bonney‘s white paper, The View from the Front, about adapting to the recession in my post, Help For Marketers Dealing with the “New Different.”

Back then …

What’s amazing to me is how little conditions have actually changed since Chris described them in 2009:

  • “Consumers have become dangerously polarized over even the most innocuous of subjects. Political feelings have become so polarized among some people that this anxiety has spilled over into the consumer marketplace.”
  • “Trust in institutions isn’t what it used to be. Whether in religion, commerce, sports, government, science or technology, individual and institutional models of propriety and high ethical standards are, well, fewer.”
  • “There are not just new words in our vocabulary, but entire new ways of interacting with other people. [Social media] has its own patois and a different level of engagement and expectation than traditional verbal and written communications. Navigating this new way of communicating is more than just plugging your old communications techniques into ‘social media.'”
  • “We are undeniably part of a complex global economy. One of the biggest battles raging in the United States … is between the nationalists and the internationalists. The former thinks it’s as easy as throwing up a wall. The latter embrace the variety and connectedness of a wider world life.”
  • “We don’t use information like we used to … We’ve evolved from a nation that had fewer, but more reliable sources of news and information into a nation of self-selecting information consumers … News and information [also] has a much briefer half-life.

And now …

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup CEO, reflects on the reality of today’s business environment in a more recent article, Human Age 2.0: Future Forces at Work:

“Many expected that as the recession subsided the world would return to business as usual. That hasn’t happened. The recovery is unlike any other and so is the business environment. Both are less stable and harder to predict, yielding new challenges and opportunities. Businesses will need to plan for uncertainty and be built for change. What is certain is the uncertainty that lies ahead and that we will see the effects of this acceleration of structural and cyclical forces.”

What’s a marketer to do?

How do you effectively compete in a continuing uncertain market? I agree with Chris, who advocates going back to the fundamentals in recognizing that consumers STILL:

  • “need reasons and confidence to spend.”
  • “need to know how products and services will enhance and integrate into their lives.”
  • “want something to get excited about.”

And we, as marketers, still “need to understand how to communicate with consumers in ways that are relevant and timely.”

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Customer service Engagement

Companies Get Lucky (?) with Partial Engagement

“I love working with my customers. They’re what keep me engaged. Can’t say I feel the same about the company I work for.”

“I’m upset by the lack of professionalism in my office. Co-workers dress sloppily. They curse in the office and don’t seem to take work seriously.  What keeps me going are the conversations I have with my counterparts in other offices.”

These highlight discussions I had recently with business professionals in different fields. I’ve heard similar sentiments from employees who stay engaged for the satisfaction of working with their customers and/or co-workers. According to a TINYPulse study on engagement and organizational culture, “Peers and camaraderie are the number one reason employees go the extra mile … not the money. Camaraderie plays the true motivating role in encouraging employees to outperform expectations.

Enjoying their work with co-workers and customers is key to employees being engaged, but it’s not enough. Total engagement happens when employees connect on three fundamental levels:

  • with the organization itself  – when employees understand the organization’s purpose and strategy, including knowing where they fit in and what’s expected of them.
  • with customers – when employees know who the customers are and what is important to them so employees can better serve them.
  • with fellow employees – when employees also understand and respect how everyone’s work is interconnected in achieving organizational goals.

The people I spoke to acknowledged they’re not disengaged, just partially engaged. How fortunate for their employers. But I can’t help wondering how much better they and their respective companies would be if they were fully engaged on all levels.

As Meatloaf sang, “two out of three ain’t bad.”  Or is it?

 

 

 

Categories
Engagement Training & Development

Don’t Discount the New Year for Employee Engagement

Every four years it happens in the U.S. – a presidential election. Too often, it’s also an excuse companies use to withhold spending based on an uncertain outcome: “We’re afraid to invest in new initiatives until we know what’s going to happen in Washington, DC.”

This wait-and-see attitude carries over into cutbacks on hiring, training & development and, ultimately, engagement. The result is a double whammy for employees — besides feeling anxious over the new year’s uncertainty, they also become frustrated with limited-to-nonexistent options for their development as the organization goes into a holding pattern. Who wants to work for a company that isn’t moving forward?

“Progress always involves risks. You can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first base.” – Frederick B. Wilcox

Uncertainty is a fact of life, regardless of what’s scheduled to occur in any given year. Holding the line by not investing in employee recruitment and ongoing development may seem like a safe strategy, but it’s also a risky one that can negatively impact employee engagement and the internal brand. Think of the opportunities such a strategy opens up for competitors who aren’t afraid to devote resources to support their employees.

No one can predict the future, other than knowing it will change. Like an ostrich with its head in the sand, hiding isn’t a viable option for business and brand success.

“He that will not sail till all dangers are over must never put to sea.” – Thomas Fuller

 

 

 

Categories
Engagement

How to Keep Your Employees Engaged During the Holidays

The last few weeks of the calendar year are stressful in the workplace as people become distracted preparing for the holidays. Employees can be overwhelmed with year-end reporting and planning deadlines just as everyone else seems to be using up the last of their vacation days. And those at work may be so into the holiday frenzy that they’ve mentally checked out.

Here are five ways managers can help employees stay on-task and engaged during the holiday season.

  • Keep employees mission-focused, customer-focused, and connected.
    Respectfully remind employees how year-end projects and planning are critical to your company’s mission and goals. Make time to recognize employees’ individual and collective efforts in taking care of customers and each other as the year winds down.
  • Acknowledge and alleviate seasonal stresses.
    Consider what you can do ahead of time to minimize year-end pressures such as starting your business planning cycle earlier (if feasible) to avoid a planning crunch when fewer people are at work. Or schedule the employee holiday lunch or dinner party in January when there are fewer social activities; this also gives employees something to look forward to after the holidays.
  • Ask employees to share their ideas.
    Go to the source and solicit suggestions from your employees as to what might be done to improve productivity during this time of year — whether in a special discussion at staff meetings or as a project for a designated employee task force.
  • Inspire and de-stress.
    • Invite employees to share with each other how they cope with seasonal work stress … the funniest holiday situation they’ve encountered at work … how they successfully defused a difficult situation with a customer, etc.
    • Give-back to the community by volunteering time as a group to work in a food bank or collect gifts for needy families. To keep such an activity from creating more stress, however, employee involvement must be voluntary with no management or peer pressure regarding time and financial contributions.
    • While bringing holiday sweets to the office is welcome by many, also consider healthy ways to reduce stress. For example, a licensed massage therapist can be hired on-site to provide 10-15 minute back massages for employees or a yoga instructor can lead mini-meditation sessions.
  • Patience, patience, patience.
    Keep in mind the end of the year can be a challenging time for everyone: you, your customers, employees, colleagues, and business partners.

Try one or more of these ideas to help get through the season. When you find what works, you can apply it next year when you go through this all over again. Happy Holidays!

 

Categories
Engagement

Evangelizing Corporate Culture: Interview with Culture Consultant Donavon Roberson

Remember taking those career aptitude tests in high school? Back then the position of “Corporate Culture Consultant” didn’t exist. If it did, knowing what I know now, that’s what I would have chosen as my preferred career.

Lucky for corporate America, it’s a valuable role that exists today. That’s why I’m delighted to feature culture consultant Donavon Roberson in this interview.  He was among the first of Zappos Insights’ Culture Evangelists responsible for helping executives learn about Zappos’ respected culture. He was also my personal tour guide when I visited Zappos in 2008.

Donavon eventually left Zappos and went on to pioneer the position at several other companies, holding titles such as Manager of Culture Development and Dream Manager. He’s the founder and Culture Consultant for The Roberson Company that’s focused on “Purpose, Process, People and Performance.”

QSM: Please tell us a bit about your background, including how you ended up as a corporate culture consultant.

Donavon: I was a youth pastor for nearly 13 years and during that time I learned the value of living by vision and values. When I had the opportunity to work for Zappos, I discovered the importance of a company that lives for their vision and values. I have had the privilege being able to take my ministry background and my business experience and meld the two together. It’s all about moving the needle in the lives of others … culture development is about building into the lives of others so that they build into the business.

QSM: Based on your experience, what are some of the best things management can do to get employees to embrace a company’s culture?

Donavon: In my opinion, management should lead the charge when it comes to culture. They should embody the expression of and example of company culture. Management needs to ensure that they are operating in a way that is consistent with the cultural expectations to which they hold others.

It’s OK if they themselves aren’t an embodiment of every value; however, there should be an open appreciation for and expectation of living out the company culture at the very highest levels. With that expectation should come an inspection of the behaviors expressed. It is VITAL that management be held accountable to the culture and hold others to the culture.

The worst thing that management OR leadership can do is to live in a way that is counter to the expressed culture. There is often an aspired culture (the culture that we would like to have) and an actual culture (the culture that truly exists). Often these two cultures are at odds and employees pick up on that quickly. This can be toxic for an organization. What is worse is what I call the accepted culture — the culture that is counter to either of the aforementioned but that which is accepted as a normal way of doing things … especially at the leadership levels.

QSM: You’ve worked with both established and start-up companies. What challenges did you find in helping shape company culture in a start-up compared to working with more established organizations?

Donavon: The challenge in either company is scalability and sustainability. The culture that many start ups have isn’t scalable, meaning it doesn’t grow very well as the company grows. With growth comes aches and pains that can stunt development and progress. When a company is in the infancy stages, it is important to think about how the choices they make today will grow into the future (if growth is part of the long range plan).

Sustainability is the company’s ability to keep culture efforts or initiatives going and consistent as a company grows. Often times an effort makes sense at the beginning and can be easily managed with little to no effort BUT as you grow you must consider the time, effort and energy that cultural efforts will have on the bottom line and determine if it is worth the ROI.

QSM:  Building and maintaining a workplace culture is not a solitary endeavor. What’s the risk of serving in a position designated as a “Chief Culture Evangelist”?

Donavon: This is an interesting question, and I don’t know that I have definitive answer; however, I do have some thoughts that I would like to share. I have found that Wall Street isn’t ready to embrace the idea of a Chief Culture Evangelist or team dedicated to culture development. The greatest issue is ROI. There are some very logical conclusions why these roles would be valuable to any organization — leadership development, employee engagement, customer service, etc. However these conclusions aren’t necessarily reflected on the bottom line: the measurement of Wall Street and Investors.

I have found that many companies in the start up stage have the flexibility to have a dedicated “culture team” but when investors enter the picture that is the first team to take a hit.

QSM: What advice would you give to someone considering a career in corporate culture development?

Donavon: Advice that I would give is to determine standards and acceptable standards of measurements for success at the outset. How do you know when the culture team is successful? What does it look like when the culture team is successful? How is that reflected in the bottom line? And then continually go back and do the research and make the adjustments necessary to remain relevant and impactful.

QSM: Thank you, Donavon!

Categories
Engagement

Why You Can’t Dismiss Corporate Culture

Corporate culture is intangible, but you can feel it and see it in action. It’s evident in how employees work together, how they treat each other (and customers) in the process, and how effective the collective organization is in pursuing its goals.

Corporate culture is a true reflection of the real values of an organization. And it’s the proverbial “elephant in the room” in places where the company’s stated values don’t align with actual values. That’s why culture dominates strategic execution (“culture eats strategy”) and why it can’t be dismissed.  According to Edgar Schein, professor emeritus at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and author of several classic books on corporate culture:

“We tend to think we can separate strategy from culture, but we fail to notice that in most organizations strategic thinking is deeply colored by tacit assumptions about who they are and what their mission is.”

Here are more great quotes on corporate culture:

“I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.” – Louis Gerstner

“The culture you create or the culture you destroy will determine the success of your business.” Rebecca L. Ray

“You can’t copy culture. …  Culture is very specific to an organization, the leadership, the employee mix and time. It’s not something you can just cut and paste into another organization.”  Tim Sackett

“A quick Google search on ‘how to create a great corporate culture’ reveals … really fantastic ideas, but they won’t ensure you a great culture. At best, they set the stage for great culture to (hopefully) arise and at worst, they are unsustainable gestures meant to game culture rather than create something genuine.” Susan Piver

“No matter how brilliant or insightful your business strategy is, a badly aligned culture will defeat it.” Don Peppers

Categories
Engagement Training & Development

Best Lessons from Bad Bosses-Part 2

We all love great bosses and hate the bad ones. The only upside to a bad boss is what we learn from our experience working with that person: primarily what not to do and, occasionally, what to do.

Following up my previous post on lessons learned from bad bosses, here is more great advice shared by colleagues.

Understand Who’s Important

The best lesson I learned from a bad boss is — to kiss your subordinates’ butts. Put another way, be of service and work for YOUR TEAM instead of the other way around. You need your team to get things done. If you are there for them when they need you, they will be there for YOU. So, for example, if one of your team members needs an extra day off or a little resource boost on a project and you deliver, they are far more likely to help you when you need to pull together a presentation for YOUR boss.

A lot of bad bosses get it reversed. They are busy ingratiating themselves to THEIR boss and treating their staff like dirt. My favorite and best boss taught me this lesson in a big way. In some ways it felt like he worked for me. Whenever I needed resources or him to push something through the system, he was there. This was a huge help in my being successful. This also meant that when he came to my office on a Friday at 4:30 p.m. begging for help on his board presentation — you KNOW I was there, and happy to do it. — Ivana S. Taylor, Small Business Influencer, DIYMarketers.com
A Bad Boss Can Do Something Right

I learned that sometimes the rules need to be broken when something important needs to be done. Not unethically, but when a rule designed to solve one problem, creates a barrier to success, it can be the right decision to do the wrong thing.

We had a process whereby a certain form needed to be filled out. It was a form designed and created 40 year earlier by the founder when there was maybe 100 employees. We had over 2,000 at the time and the form was no longer needed. But no one wanted to stop using it because they feared the repurcussions. My bad boss simply stopped using the form. Two years later someone asked about the forms and he played stupid. We never had to do the form again. Nothing fell apart. Nothing stopped working. The world went on without it.

Lesson: The requirements of the past can stop you from creating a future. — Paul Hebert, consultant/speaker/writer for engagement, incentives and rewards

Don’t Ignore the Value of Engaged Employees

  1. Recognize the fundamental economics of having engaged employees, customers, channel partners, and communities, which is that: companies with highly engaged audiences relationships do better financially than the average company; relationships with customers and talent are a company’s biggest financial and brand equity asset; and disengagement has hard costs in terms of turnover, lower productivity, poor service, more accidents, less healthy people, and legal suits that can have a significant effect on the bottom line and brand equity.

  2. Empower and value people, rather than control them and treat them like statistics: people who feel empowered, act like owners and watch your back — people who feel controlled, act like slaves.

  3. Do as Tom Peters said:  “Manage by walking around.”  — Bruce Bolger, Managing Director, Enterprise Engagement Alliance

You Can’t Fake It + Other Important Lessons

  • Playing politics never pays — It’s shallow, transparent and short-sighted.  It may help you win the day, but it will lose you a ton of respect long-term with peers, superiors and subordinates.

  • Communicate clearly (not in code) — There’s no excuse for allowing ambiguity to cloud judgment, direction or execution. If your style of management is to expect your team to predict or guess what you mean and want, that’s terrible leadership. Not all news is good news, but people want clarity, not innuendos.

  • Invest time with your team — Absentee management never works. You can’t hide behind emails. And it’s never a good idea to look annoyed when one of your team members wants to see you or ask you a question. Successful management requires time, it requires an investment in spending time with your team to make them better, allow them to become more autonomous and productive. That just takes time, but it creates results, loyalty and longevity (for you and for them).

  • Superficial optics will backfire — This particular boss told us she wanted us to be at our desks as much as possible, so that people walking by would see how hard we are working. She literally said that to us. You can imagine what that did to her credibility.  — Matt Heinz, president, Heinz Marketing, Inc.

Special thanks to Ivana Taylor, Paul Hebert, Bruce Bolger, and Matt Heinz for sharing their lessons learned from bad bosses.

You’re invited to share
What lessons did you learn from your experience with a bad boss?