Posts Tagged ‘management’

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A New Year’s Letter to Employees: Watch, Ask, Think

Monday, December 30th, 2013

At the start of each new year, I like to draft a letter to employees from management – offering a perspective that brings in the new year in a more significant way. Last’s year’s letter was about asking employees to commit to being better – at work, home and with the planet. By each of us committing to improve in every area of our lives, we can affect significant change.

This year’s letter is about asking questions. See, all the information employees need to show up more significantly in their jobs comes from asking powerful and important questions. Most employees, however, feel that management is supposed to provide all the information, or the workplace culture doesn’t openly encourage employees to challenge or ask. We need their eyes, ears, thoughts and questions to gather information to build an exceptional organization. This year’s letter is about encouraging employees to get good at asking questions and using the information gathered for great action. Please use this with your employees if you like the message.

 

To My Employees,

A new year is here. This is a great time for us to recommit to our organization’s vision, to our customers and to our employees.

Our success happens when we are clear about our direction, have accurate information, then build and implement our plan. All successful plans start with knowing the facts, challenging things that don’t work and inventing new possibilities. To get the facts, we have to become masters at asking powerful and meaningful questions– to expand what we know and to develop new and stronger actions to be extraordinary in 2014.

This year, don’t accept things as they are. Ask how they can be bigger, bolder and better. Ask how you can share ideas with others, invent new things and expand our influence as an organization. Get comfortable asking great questions then using what you learn to make us better.

Here are some examples of questions to ask in the workplace:

1. What is one thing I can do today that will connect me more significantly to my team, solve a challenge, inspire and engage another, save money, invent a new idea, improve my performance, tell our organization’s story, offer feedback, be open to feedback, etc.?

2. How can we make our contact with our customers more of an “event” so they become more impressed and more loyal?

3. What are two ways to save X% from our spending on ___________?

4. What is it that makes our workplace a great place to work, and how can we do more of it? What challenges our workplace as a great place to work and what can we change to improve it?

In this process of asking powerful workplace questions, you will see the value of asking powerful life questions to help you show up more significantly in all aspects of your life. Thank you for your effort, dedication and commitment to excellence.

Wishing you and your families a happy, healthy and successful 2014.

Best regards,

Your Manager

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“Don’t Sit This One Out”

Wednesday, November 6th, 2013

“Don’t sit this one out,” is a statement one of my CEO clients says to his staff. He continues, “Show up, step up and stand out – there is no room for any employee to sit out anything in the workplace.”

Statistics still show that employee engagement is still a problem. According to the Gallup Organization, fifty-two percent of employees do just enough not to get fired – they are disinterested in and disengaged from their work.Add to that 19% of employees who actively hate their jobs and then number of average performers moves to over 70% – employees who choose to “sit this one out” – to not show up passionate, committed and focused on performing. What kind of company can you have when more than two thirds of your employees choose not to bring their A-game to work?

Employee engagement – the discretionary effort employees bring to their work – continues to be a problem in many companies. Let me share some of what this CEO has implemented in his company to encourage his people not to sit this one out.

1. He ensures information moves freely. Create an obstacle to information and both engagement and performance suffer. A-level employees want to work in organizations that share all information – the important and the trivial – so employees are constantly informed. It is hard to be engaged and excited about work if you don’t what is true or what is happening next. Increase management communication with employees; create an intranet, send a weekly email or host team meetings. Insist that information not only be timely and accurate, but that all employees be part of the information flow.

2. He ensures performance expectations are clear. A particular form of information that needs to be absolutely clear is performance expectations. Performance expectations define the performance “done right” – this is so employees know what the completed task done well looks like. With the clarity of expectations, the employee now has the ability to determine how to achieve the expectation – employees have a performance voice and ownership in the process. Ownership increases engagement.

3. He ensures that all employees contribute improvement ideas. Train employees to be opportunity-hunters; have them regularly review every aspect of the business and suggest ways to add greater value, improve the quality of the service event or anticipate a future challenge. Applaud employees for their ability to watch, connect and focus on ways to improve.

4. He ensures everyone is held accountable. By training managers to become more coach-like, employees are held more accountable for not only their results, but their thinking. Managers are trained in how to coach their employees – how to ask more questions to help them generate their solutions and own their performance.Shifting managers’ mindsets out of telling into asking and holding accountable shifts the role of manager throughout the organization.

In great organizations, committed to doing great work, there is no room for anyone to sit any part of the day out.These organizations hire based on talent, define performance expectations, move information freely, think innovatively and hold each other accountable. These steps are intentional – to raise the performance and engagement of each employee.

How engaged are your employees and what are you doing to constantly improve it? If your team is close to the national average where 70% of employees are in some form of disengagement, what will you do today to change things? When it comes to employee performance and engagement, you just have to get it right.

Need help engaging and inspiring great performance from your team? , we are certified workplace coaches who have developed the Fired Up! Process - talent-based tools to help you attract, hire and retain today’s best employees. We can help.

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3 Ways To Reduce Workplace Stress

Tuesday, May 28th, 2013

Ready for some alarming statistics? 83% of American workers say they feel stressed out by their jobs (this is up from 73% in 2011). The number 1 cause of stress is what is called “job pressure” – the combination of co-worker and boss relationships, and work overload.

This pressure is taking a toll on the health of the employee as the use of antidepressants has increased 400% over the past 30 years (just about the time when the industrial age ended and the today’s intellectual and service age started). The pressure also shows in the organization’s bottom line as the annual cost of stress-related healthcare and missed work is over $300 billion annually.

Work doesn’t have to be so stressful. The lower the stress, the greater the performance, engagement and ultimately loyalty. Helping employees minimize workplace stress is a sound strategic initiative. Here are three ways to start to decrease employee workplace stress:

  1. Refocus on hiring for fit. One of the greatest reasons for employee stress is being hired into jobs that employees are not good at and not interested in doing. Most organizations use experience as the primary hiring qualification. But because an employee has done the job before doesn’t mean that he is good at it and likes doing it. If not, job stress increases. Today’s service economy requires that management hire based on skills, experience AND behaviors – where behaviors are more important. Behaviors determine how intrinsically good and interested the employee is in the job. Reduce stress by hiring employees who fit the job – they feel capable, competent and confident. Commit to hiring based on talents and to hiring employees who fit the behavioral profile needed in each job.
  2. Share more information. If you really want to stress out your employees, keep them in the dark. Sharing information, even difficult or challenging information, is important to help employees deal with what is fact in their workplace. Information that is openly and honestly presented allows employees to stay connected to what is accurate. This way, they don’t invent stories or add fictitious details because they do not know what is true. Share openly and honestly, and expect the sharing to be returned.
  3. Expand your listening. Sharing information is one thing, but tuning in to what employees think, feel and say is critical to helping them feel heard, respected and valued. Remember back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. When the lower aspects of Needs Hierarchy are unaddressed, employees are too distracted to concentrate on performance. So if employees have managers who are available and present – who actively listen, care and respond – employees feel heard, have information and the stress level is reduced.

The statistics are real – our employees are stressed. What is it you can do to help reduce the stress in your workplace knowing that the stress is both costing you money and challenging the health of your employees?

This is a great topic to bring up to your senior team, particularly your strategic HR partners, to have a meaningful discussion and to build a stress-management strategy. Include in your strategy a more sound talent and fit hiring/role alignment approach, expanded information sharing and coaching your managers into becoming better listeners and communicators.

 to learn about the Fire Up! Process and how its ability to increase employee engagement also reduces employee stress. More information, tools and resources are at FireUpYourEmployees.com.

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Why Employees Think The Grass Is Greener Elsewhere

Wednesday, March 20th, 2013

(And What To Do About It)

A recent Workforce Management Magazine article stated 19 million employees, or 13 percent of the workforce, are planning on changing jobs this year. Two thoughts come immediately to mind:

  1. Why do employees want to change jobs?
  2. Why now?

Let’s start with the second question: why now? After the past five years of recession-related working conditions (i.e., reduced staff numbers, employees expected to do more with less, fewer rewards, little or no pay increases, little or no development for job improvement), employees are tired with the way things are. Though they may understand this happens in a recession, there is an innate need to seek out better conditions.

Abraham Maslow illustrates this in his Hierarchy of Needs. When our fundamental needs (physiological, food, safety) are not met, we are fixated on improving them. But this also means we’re distracted, in a way, focused on finding ways to improve our situations before we can advance to self-actualization (great performance). And if we are unable to make any change or improvement, we move. We seek out other places. The slight improvements we’ve seen in the economy has been just enough to empower today’s workforce to think they may find something better out there, and they think it will be worth the effort. After all, the grass is always greener, right?

So this gets to the real reason why employees want to change jobs – beliefs: they no longer believe management is leading effectively. They no longer believe in the mission, or the work, or the people. Employees want to change jobs because they don’t have the confidence that their management can make things right for them.

Before your teams head out to search for greener grass, win them back. Show them your company and you as managers are the best. Here are some suggestions to do this successfully:

1. Increase the communication about everything. When times are difficult, many managers feel that sharing the difficulties will be a sign of weakness or ineffectiveness. But sharing this information lets employees have context on what’s true in their workplace, empowering them to be regularly involved in identifying the solutions that exist. Get their input on how to keep work meaningful, valuable and important. Excluded employees check out, then they leave. Keep them in the know.

2. Focus more on what you can do for your employees (not on what you can’t do for them). The employees that stick around have weathered a tremendously difficult period. You know it, and they know it. And they’re getting tired. So what can you do to show your appreciation for their decision to stay, show up and tough it out? What does this show them about your belief in them? How can you use this moment to show your gratitude, humanity and personal interest in each employee? We are quick to share what we can’t or no longer offer for employees. What if our focus changed to what we can do instead?

3. Give them a reason to stay. One of the reasons our best people leave is that we don’t have a discussion with them on why they should stay. We just imagine that employees will stay and be loyal, but that is a naïve belief. Even before the recession, employees changed jobs every 18-36 months. Despite the recession, the underlying problem still exists: we don’t have career conversations with our employees on where they are going and why they should stay. Start a development discussion with employees once or twice a year that connects what employees do best with high value applications in the company. Help them see a reason to stay that is built around their talents, values and interests. Make it personal.

It is human nature to always think there is something better in some other place. Why not make that “something better” in your place? Reconnect with employees in a meaningful way to encourage them to choose to stay – to rekindle their belief in their company, their work and their management. Not only do you build a more powerful and engaged team, but you also show great continuity and consistency to your customers as they see the same team here today, here tomorrow.

To learn more about creating a greater workplace culture to help retain your best employees, visit FireUpYourEmployees.com or sign up for our free 1-hour teleseminar titled, Your People Are Your Profits. We’ll show you how we guide organizations and their managers in how to engage and inspire a superstar workforce.

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