Why do Employees Fear Workplace Engagement?

We have in our “interesting read file” a great article, The 3 Fears Employees Have About Engagement — and How to Confront Them. The article was written by Chris Powell of TLNT | Talent Management and HR. It was written so well that we wanted to share the main gist of it with all of you. Chris hit the right points about employee engagement, so we figured we wouldn’t reinvent the wheel. Here’s a bit of what Chris had to say.

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Employee engagement initiatives don’t have to be stressful. Too many times, we’ve seen organizations dragging their feet on engagement work. And we get it; change is hard, and a new engagement initiative can mean big changes in culture and operations at an organization. But, those changes result in very good things — like better retention, more satisfied employees, higher productivity, and a healthier bottom line.

In many cases, the source of stress is actually unfounded fears. Here are the most common fears we see at the companies we’ve worked with, along with some pointers on how to successfully manage them.

1. Fear of the unknown

If you’re considering an employee engagement initiative, it’s probably because you believe people are disengaged at your organization. You’re losing employees or productivity is down. But what if it’s even worse than you think it is? What if you survey employees and the results spell out exactly what they don’t like about working there?

For many leaders, contemplating those questions are a fast track to stress. They get frozen by fear of what they don’t know and what might be uncovered by an employee survey. And that simply compounds the problem, especially if any announcement about improving engagement was made to the employee population.

The reality: It’s impossible to manage engagement without knowing your baseline. It may be an eye-opener to see results from a survey, but you can’t change without it. You know you want to improve engagement at your organization, so keep in mind that knowing the specifics will help you manage it more effectively.

2. Fear of irrelevance

Some HR departments hold off on engagement initiatives because they may think that employee engagement is a passing fad or another box to check off. They may resist implementing a change because they think in the next year or two there will be another trend to chase after.

The reality: Employee engagement initiatives get proven results. When Gallup performed a meta-analysis on its Q12 measure, it found that engaged organizations perform better. It describes the relationship between engagement and performance as “substantial” and that this relationship is applicable across organizations.

Employee engagement represents an opportunity to coordinate employee attitudes and business goals for long-term success.

3. Fear of extra work

Once an organization commits to doing an employee engagement survey and gets the results, it faces a critical question: Who will do the work to improve engagement? Not doing anything is even worse than not surveying in the first place; it only gets employees’ hopes up that something might change, and when it doesn’t, they can be even more disengaged.

The reality: The results you get from your employee survey will provide a path you can follow to boost engagement, but remember that the path is made up of many small steps. It’s impossible to change engagement levels overnight, and there’s no reason to try to do so. Managers are often on the front line when it comes to instituting engagement efforts, so find ways to educate and empower them to take on engagement-boosting efforts as part of their work.

Thinking about your business objectives and the role employees play in achieving them can help ease some of the stress around engagement. An engagement initiative can help identify things managers need to know to drive performance and keep them in front of problems before they happen.

Employee engagement is not a switch you can turn on. It’s a series of small steps that the entire organization must take over time to achieve change. The process doesn’t have to be hard; it simply takes a commitment from people at all levels to make changes in the way the company operates internally.

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At Tweed-Weber, we make implementing an Employee Engagement Survey easy. We can help you Know More, so you can Do More. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber).

Is your organizational culture a good one?

Organizational culture is the unwritten and often unspoken assumptions on which all organizational decisions are made and action is taken. It is the result of demonstrated behavior over a period of time. In other words, it is behavior that has become organizational habit over the years. Organizations pursuing a true quality culture are finding that developing the long-term behavior consistent with that pursuit is more difficult than realized.

Management behaviors consistent with a quality culture include coaching, guiding, and facilitating an empowered work force toward organizational goals and objectives. In more traditionally managed organizations, management behavior involves goal attainment through the direction of others. Problem solving is largely seen as a management responsibility. The challenge many managers face today is demonstrating quality behavior in "moments of truth." Moments of truth are those daily situations that require immediate attention. Often times, our routine behavioral tendencies guide us to actions that can only be defined as disempowering. However, it is in these situations where we have the best opportunity to demonstrate our organization's respect for the ability of our employees to add value, and to have an empowered workforce.

Below are some things to remember when you are faced with moments of truth.

•Think before you act. "How can I involve and empower my people in this situation?"

•Seek first to understand; get all of the facts straight before moving forward.

•Your employees are watching your behavior; set a good example that is consistent with the message you want to send.

•You are not expected to have all the answers; respect the idea of teamwork in problem solving.

•Think of how you would like to be treated by your manager. Most times, this will hold true for how you manage your people.

If you are trying to ensure a culture of employee involvement and empowerment, we can help. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber). Tweed-Weber can provide you with a tried and true method for obtaining employee feedback that can help you strengthen your organizational culture.

Create an Employee "Think Tank"

The saying, “perception is reality” is never more true when observing employees of an organization relative to how they perform and interact with each other on a daily basis. Having a clear and common understanding of employee perceptions offers enormous opportunities for ideas and improvement in the future. Have you ever wondered how to implement an employee survey to help foster high regard and recognition for employees’ thoughts and opinions, and to help them feel like a valuable part of the team? We can help.  

 

There are different types of employee surveys that help to obtain feedback, and the goal of each of those surveys depends on the questions you want to ask.

 

Employee Climate Survey

 

The typical survey we conduct for our clients is an online Employee Perception Survey, also called a “climate survey.” For this kind of employee feedback initiative, you are trying to understand how employees feel about working at the organization. The following categories are normally used as a basis for asking questions:

• Job perception
• Work environment
• Opportunities for involvement and work improvement
• Management support
• Compensation and career advancement
• Education and training
• Overall understanding of (your organization)

Conducting a climate survey is essential in your efforts to identify areas for internal improvement. Retaining employees is a huge issue for most organizations today, and doing all that you can to create a work environment that fosters respect, teamwork, and loyalty is not only the right thing to do, but a smart one as well. A high level of employee retention positively impacts the bottom line.

 

Employee Think Tank Survey

 

Another type of survey that is gaining speed with our clients is an “Employee Think Tank” survey. For this kind of feedback initiative, you are trying to tap into the minds of your employees by asking more strategic questions that could identify potential opportunities for the company based on what they see and experience at work. The following are some questions to ask employees in this type of survey (just to name a few):

• In our current strategic plan, XYZ actions are described as critical elements for reaching our long-term growth plan. Which one do you feel is most critical to our growth in the future, and why?
• What specific factors do you believe influence customers’ purchasing decisions relative to the products/services we offer?
• What are the top three things you believe customers need most from us? 
• What is one idea you have for making it more convenient for customers to do business with us?
• If there is one area in which you feel we have lost the most ground over the past two years, what would that be, and why?
• What factors do you believe stand in the way of our overall growth?
• What customer service/support activity do you think we should offer to satisfy customer needs/demands, but currently we do not provide?
• Overall, what should we STOP doing or offering because you feel it adds little to no value at all to customers?
• If you became President of our organization tomorrow, what’s the one thing you would do immediately to increase sales, and why?

You would be surprised and thrilled with the depth of thinking and feedback these kinds of questions spark in employees (especially those employees in positions that have direct contact with customers and the marketplace). Because they view the organization from different angles, they provide a holistic snapshot that you can feel confident covers all bases within your operations. Implementing an Employee Think Tank survey will help you see things through a different lens that will help ensure you are not missing the obvious when developing strategies and planning for future growth.

 

How much insight, knowledge, and wisdom is being untapped within your organization? An Employee Think Tank survey will help you find out. We can help you Know More, so you can Do More. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber). 

Assessing a High Performance Team

Teamwork in business has become one of the hottest subjects in business and supervision literature. Everywhere you look, there is another article on self-directed teams, self-managing teams, cross-functional teams, project teams, quality improvement teams, and of course, management teams. The primary reason for this is simple.

 

It appears that baby boomers and other people born after World War II like being part of a team. Where their parents relied on themselves, their own skills, their own motivation, and their own ability to get the job done, later generations look to their peers for the support, motivation, and assistance to achieve work-related objectives. Whereas those people born prior to 1946 (the year traditionally used to mark the beginning of the baby boom) generally want to be told what to do and simply allowed to do it, the people born after 1946 want to be involved in as many aspects of their business lives as possible. They want to participate. They want to be “in on things.” They want to know why they are doing the work they are doing. They want to feel they are contributing to a “greater good.” They want to feel they are part of a team.

 

This emerging reality causes us to focus on two fundamental questions:

1. What is the difference between a group of people and a team?
2. What is the difference between a team and a “high performance” team?

The key difference between a group of people and a team is a team is a group of people pulling together in the same direction and dependent on each other for their common success. 

 

The distinction between a team and a high performance team is not so easily drawn. In order for a team to be properly described as high performance, it must possess seven characteristics. These characteristics are: 

1. A mission that motivates 
2. Common goals 
3. Mastery of the fundamentals 
4. A communications system 
5. Trust 
6. A need for continuous improvement and the ability to correct course
7. A task/social mix

When all seven of these characteristics are present, the performance level of a team increases significantly. It moves from average performance to high performance, and its members enjoy the corresponding benefits. Let’s take an in-depth look at each of these characteristics and the role they play in team building efforts.

 

A mission that motivates

A mission raises people above the day-to-day tasks that make up the bulk of what we call work. This is no less important when attempting to focus a team than when attempting to lead individuals. In order for a team to rise above the average, it must have a focus that is above the average. High performance teams have a clearly defined mission. They are able to look beyond the immediately visible and see the future. Most importantly, it is a future that is worth the extra effort required if the team is to distinguish itself through its performance.

 

Common goals

While a mission is the first characteristic of a high performance team, it alone is not enough to unite the individuals who comprise the team. Somewhere along the path to exceptional performance, that mission must be converted into specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-based goals – goals that can be seen and touched.

 

Organizations invest a considerable amount of time, effort, and energy in establishing strategic goals, annual performance plans, and budgets. Once established, these goals should be measured on a regular basis. If you learn about and pay attention to these planning functions, you should be able to connect the vision of your mission with your actions as team members.

 

Mastery of the fundamentals

Once a team has a mission that motivates its performance and goals to direct its activity, it is essential the individuals who comprise the team have the skills necessary to successfully achieve the first two characteristics. Average teams have ability. High performance teams master the fundamentals. They know the basic skills of their work so well their execution of those basics is instinctive.

 

A communications system

On closer examination, however, you would find the main reason people feel communication is a problem is there is often no real agreement as to what they should be meeting or talking about. The business world does not suffer from a lack of communication, but rather from unfocused communication. Everyone is talking; we just are not talking about the same things.

 

High performance teams do not just communicate, they agree as to what the communication should center around. They have a system for communication.

 

Trust

Whenever two or more people work together, the question of trust is bound to be raised.

 

High performance team members understand there are three different kinds of trust that must exist if true trust is to exist. Those three kinds of trust are:

1. Disclosure trust is the trust that exists when any member of a team believes he or she can say absolutely anything to any other team member without fear of being criticized, ridiculed, or talked about behind his or her back.
2. Contractual trust is knowing when someone makes a commitment to you, they have every intention of keeping that commitment – at the time it is made.
3. Informational trust is the ability to trust what a person says to you is, to the best of that person’s knowledge, true, complete, and accurate.

A need for continuous improvement and the ability to correct course

All teams perform at some level. High performance teams perform at a level consistently above the average team. One reason is they are never satisfied with their present level, whatever it might be. They consistently strive for continuous improvement as a natural part of their day-to-day activities. Course correction is the ability to realize you are going down the wrong path and having the courage to change direction. This is often easier said than done because it sometimes requires an admission that an earlier decision was wrong.

 

A task/social mix

The final characteristic of high performance teams may seem trivial at first, but upon closer examination you will find it is actually the result of the presence of the first six elements. This seventh characteristic is a task/social mix. Sometimes referred to as the “beer and pizza syndrome,” task/social mix is the ability of team members to enjoy and appreciate each other’s company on a personal, as well as a professional basis. It is the ability to grow and improve from simply being together, regardless of the setting.

 

As you invest your energies in building a high performance team, it is essential you understand the role each of these characteristics plays in your efforts. All are required if you are to build a truly high performance team. Most importantly, you, as a member of your team, must constantly and objectively evaluate your team’s progress toward them. The status of being a high performance team does not come without effort. The results, however, are clearly worth the work.

 

Everyone enjoys being part of a winning team. Research shows that winning teams demonstrate certain characteristics and patterns of behavior. By assessing how frequently and effectively your team demonstrates these characteristics, you will be able to make improvements that are necessary to become a truly high performance team. For more information on how to embark upon a High Performance Team Assessment, call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com, and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber).

 

 

Market Research and Strategic Planning: Tools for Strategic Management

Over the past several years, much has been written about the value of teams and the positive impact a successful team culture can have on an organization. We believe that to be true, and conduct employee surveys all the time to assess the health and climate of organizations. Greater levels of involvement and empowerment have resulted in statistically supported levels of enhanced productivity. But what about at the leadership level? That is a different ball game. Balancing traditional executive leadership behavior with the elements of successful teaming can be frustrating. A number of actual case studies show that team failures can result in detrimental effects to an organization's overall competitiveness. Where do these initiatives often fail? Typically, they are flawed from the start. You cannot approach a management team the same way you approach a project or functional team. The level of responsibility is obviously different, as well as the nature of the work for which the team is responsible. Successful management teams are created with these differences fully understood from the start by all team members.

A model for high performance teams at the management level is essential because a strong management team "at the top" can be a tremendous source of competitive advantage. In addition, a strong management team is extremely enabling to an organization looking to leverage leadership from a designated individual to a natural team. It takes time, but starting correctly can improve the probability of success.

Developing a game plan
When it comes to strategic planning, it is hard to avoid sports analogies. This is perfectly logical. Business, like sports, requires scouting, planning, skill and execution – all performed in a competitive arena. You could never imagine a professional team in any sport sustaining a winning tradition without a well-constructed, well-executed game plan. A strategic plan is your organization's game plan for winning. When the management team has defined its primary role as providing effective guidance and leadership for the organization, it recognizes strategic planning as the tool. The following are three basic actions that need to be taken in order to develop winning organizational "game plans."

#1 – Involve your management team in discovering what is truly going on in your competitive arena.
Perform a meaningful market analysis that includes a significant level of customer input. This is critical for two reasons: 1) you can't develop a sound plan based on intuitive hunches alone; and 2) your management team needs to develop a consensus relative to what is going on out there. In order for a management team to perform its primary role, the elements of market awareness and urgency will be essential. A purposeful information gathering activity will help address this requirement.

#2 – Develop long-term objectives and define strategies to accomplish those objectives.
It is critical to know where you are heading. Are you looking for a 20% growth in sales with a minimum 12% net profit? Are you looking to increase market share by 50% in a specific area? Are you determined to establish a dominant position in a given market? Whatever you determine, make it a stretch, but attainable. Defining the strategies to get you there depends upon your organization’s source(s) of market advantage. The five sources of market advantage are low price, product differentiation, unrivaled service, niching, and partnering. Upon which source(s) will you base your organization’s growth? In order to determine your organization’s sources(s) of market advantage, you will need to reference the findings of your market research and your team’s assessment of your organization’s internal strengths and weaknesses.

#3 – Communicate the plan and implement the strategies.
Communication is key for successful implementation. Winning companies have a large percentage of employees that understand the mission, vision, values, and strategies of the organization. This common understanding directs their actions. It is extremely important to work towards making communication a more efficient process. Keep in mind that effective communication is an ongoing process which takes discipline.

Bringing it all together
Implementing a strategic plan is an ongoing effort, one that involves the alignment of people and processes behind defined objectives and strategies. We believe this is the responsibility of the management team. Successfully addressing this issue will require your management team to make (and truly believe) the assumption that the large majority of people in the organization (if not all) would rather do a good job than a bad job. People need direction, guidance, feedback, and appraisal in order to work in an effective and efficient manner. Providing this ongoing support should be the responsibility of the management team, and the process and appropriate skills should be developed in order to provide this support effectively. This aspect of managerial performance is often overlooked. Professional management behavior does not naturally evolve, it is developed purposefully. Accountable organizations are those that recognize and act on this principle.

Conducting research and developing a strategic plan is not as daunting as it may appear. If you believe it has merit, it is probably best to talk to someone who has experience in helping similar organizations through the process. Doing this will help you increase your level of awareness and understanding about the requirements, benefits, and potential pitfalls. As you and the people of your organization approach the end of 2013, ask yourselves whether you are ready to make a significant change to take your business to the next level. If the answer is yes, then you will need to do something significantly different, and we can help. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber). We would be glad to share our experiences with you and help you decide the right plan of attack for your organization.

Research and Strategic Planning: A Foundation for Strategic Change

The word change means to make different, to alter in condition or appearance. In business organizations today, change is all around us. We see constant technological change, political change, social change, economic change, environmental change, and market change. Some change just happens to us. It is beyond our control. Other change happens because we make it happen.

The word strategy means skillful management in getting the better of an adversary or attaining an end. In business organizations, strategy refers to the planned actions we will take to gain and sustain competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Strategic change, therefore, is the process of purposefully making our organization different in order to gain and sustain competitive advantage in the marketplace. It is to make our organization more productive and more effective than our competitors.

Leading Strategic Change
Our work over the years with various manufacturing, service, health care, and human service organizations has focused on developing and implementing strategies. We begin the strategy development process by gathering feedback from important stakeholder groups to avoid “planning in a bubble.” Those stakeholder groups can include employees, customers, prospects, industry leaders, community leaders, etc.

Strategic change begins with the strategic planning process. As top executives of an organization work through the planning process, they identify one or more strategic actions that must be taken to achieve the mission of the organization and to create differentiation in the marketplace. Whenever strategic actions are implemented, change occurs.

The Planner Perspective vs. The User Perspective
The planner is the person or group of people who conceives, develops and implements the change. Users are all of the people who are affected by the change and, to some degree, are expected to change their behavior. Planners tend to concentrate on the physical or mechanical change. They construct plans to deal with this change from their own perspective. However, physical change is almost always accompanied by behavioral change. We ask people to do things differently, yet we fail to look at this change from the user's point of view. Actions to achieve behavioral change must be specifically integrated with those plans which produce physical change.

The process of managing strategic change, from a planner's perspective, follows a linear path from plan generation through implementation and renewal. Specifically, there are seven phases involved in the process: 1) research/information gathering; 2) action plan development; 3) pre­implementation planning; 4) implementation; 5) de-bugging; 6) refinement; and 7) plan renewal. Each phase addresses issues as seen from the planner's perspective.

As the strategic change goes through these seven phases, the people who are affected go through a series of experiences. While the process from a planner's perspective is very linear, the process from a user's perspective contains a number of different iterations. The series of experiences are first explained in levels of use: non-use; mechanical use; and routine use. As the change process goes through the seven phases and users progress through the three levels of use, they also go through eight stages of user concern. Those stages are: 1) awareness; 2) information seeking; 3) personal concern – (how will this affect me?); 4) mechanical concern (how will this work?); 5) new understanding achieved; 6) concern for consequences; 7) acceptance; and 8) commitment.

Facilitation
An experienced facilitator, one who understands the issues discussed in this blog and has demonstrated expertise in research and strategic planning, will add value to an organization's strategic change activities. If you are trying to identify and implement change throughout your organization, we can help. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber). 

Tweed-Weber’s stakeholder research, coupled with our strategic planning process, can help you proactively execute change within your organization that will help you gain and sustain a competitive advantage in your marketplace.