The Performance Improvement Blog

Employee Engagement: Define Your Terms

Employee engagement is in decline according to a Gallup Inc. report that was released this month. That might be the case, but without a shared definition of employee engagement, we can’t agree on what can be done about it, if anything.

Gallup defines levels of engagement in this way:

Engaged (30% of the U.S. population): Deeply committed to the success of their organization and emotionally connected to its mission and goals. Routinely willing to put forth discretionary effort.

Disengaged (52% of the U.S. population): Less emotionally connected to their work and less compelled to put forth extra effort. They show up for work but generally do only the minimum required.

Actively Disengaged (18% of the U.S. population): Actively against what the organization, and their boss, is trying to get done.

Different definitions of employee engagement are used in other studies. Thomas Britt, professor of industrial psychology at Clemson University, says that a worker can be engaged but not committed. - See more at: http://stephenjgill.typepad.com/performance_improvement_b/2009/06/employee-engagement-is-not-employee-commitment-.html#sthash.rleKZilv.dpuf  Engaged but not committed workers are likely to leave an organization when resources get tight or those workers are unhappy with leadership.

In an April 2008 post, I asked this question about the meaning of employee engagement: Is it about enthusiasm for one’s job, satisfaction from one’s work, acting to further the organization’s interests, dedication to doing the work, applying discretionary effort, involvement in the business, connections to others at work, emotional attachment to the company, a sense of empowerment, or a willingness to go the extra mile to get something done for the company? - See more at: http://stephenjgill.typepad.com/performance_improvement_b/2008/04/define-your-ter.html#sthash.FIP33ezE.dpuf

Sharlyn Lauby, of HR Bartender, offers this as an attempt at an all-inclusive definition: 

Employee engagement lies at intersection of maximum contribution for the business and maximum satisfaction for employees. It’s a sustainable level of high performance that benefits both the company and the employee. See more at: http://www.hrbartender.com/2013/employee/the-definition-of-employee-engagement/

Many more definitions and meanings of employee engagement can be found on "The Employee Engagement Network." See more at: http://employeeengagement.ning.com/

I don’t have a problem with having different definitions as long as we are clear about the definition we are using in a particular study or in any action we take to improve engagement in a particular organization and situation. Somebody might be enthusiastic about his or her work but not agree with the direction of senior management, or vice versa. Increasing that person’s engagement will depend on whether we are talking about attitudes toward the work or attitudes toward strategic goals. One requires changing an employee's job and the other requires creating a shared vision. 

How to Manage Temporary Employees

Temps, independent contractors, contingent workers, and free-lancers have become the norm, not the exception. As I wrote in a post in March 2010:

Unlike previous recession recoveries, this one will not re-employ large numbers of laid off workers. Because of technology, operational efficiencies, a project focus, and out-sourcing, many companies are finding that they can be more productive with fewer employees. And because of uncertainty about the post-recession economy, they are reluctant to make new hires permanent. Employers have found that they can get the job done by supplementing their regular employees with temps. This gives companies the freedom to increase and decrease their workforce depending on what is needed at the time.

The May 10 issue of Crain’s Detroit Business confirms this prediction. The author writes:

Increased consumer demand, a greater need for flexibility and new health-care requirements are prompting businesses from Dearborn-based Ford Motor Co. to the PeaceHealth health-care system in Washington state to turn to staffing firms…The U.S. has added 913,200 temporary workers since the end of the recession in June 2009 – about 19 percent of all new jobs. Their number rose to 2.66 million in April, about 11,300 shy of the April 2000 record, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures released May 3.

Labor economists are predicting that the number of temporary workers will set a new record in the very near future. And this is without including all of the contracted services such as legal, PR, accounting, Web support, employee training, and management consulting.

Are business leaders prepared for this change in the workforce? How will managers help temporary workers maximize their contribution to the organization?  

BusinessWeek labeled them the “disposable worker”, a pejorative term but symptomatic of the way many managers view this segment of employees. This view is based on at least three misconceptions: 1) temporary workers are not committed to the work, they just want a paycheck; 2) temporary workers are not critical to the success of the organization; and 3) it’s not worth investing time, energy, and money in the development of temporary workers.

The truth is that most temporary workers want to do a good job and care deeply about the quality of their work. The work they do is often critical to the success of the organization. And if they are customer-facing, then they are shaping customer attitudes toward the company.

As far as investing in temporary workers, that time, energy, and money will have immediate payoff and, because you never know how long that person will work for the organization or how many times they will come back to the company in the future, it is worth the risk to train and develop that person. When they go elsewhere, they take the goodwill and learning with them which is good for the community and good for the reputation of the organization.

Regardless of how long temporary workers have been with your organization, they should be treated as important contributors to your success. Applying the 5As Framework, here are five things you should keep in mind when supervising these employees:

1)      Make sure that they understand how their jobs are aligned with the success of the organization. They should know how what they are being asked to do contributes to achieving business goals.

2)      Let them know that you anticipate that they will have a positive experience and that their work is significant. Communicate high expectations for their performance.

3)      Form an alliance with them for the purpose of their learning and success. Give them informal and formal feedback on how they are doing and how they can improve.

4)      Create opportunities and give encouragement to apply what they know and what they are learning to their jobs. Being temporary means that it is all that much more urgent to provide these opportunities.

5)      Measure their success and hold them accountable for doing a good job. This means being clear with them about the indicators of success and how you will help them achieve those outcomes.

It is easy to make the mistake of assuming that temporary workers are not the real workforce and do not deserve our full attention. That is, in effect, discarding a large and growing portion of the workers who can make our organizations successful. We need to embrace this segment and apply the same good practices to them that we use to develop any high performing and engaged workforce. 

Survey of Organization Performance Challenges

Leaders today face many challenges in facilitating organization performance improvement. Fifteen of these problems are listed in a survey of organizational performance challenges. The link to this survey follows this paragraph. Please click on the link and take a few minutes now to rank order the items on the list. I think you will find the exercise to be enlightening. If I receive a sufficient number of responses, I will report the results in a future post.

Survey of Organization Performance Challenges

What would you add to this list?

If you wish to find resources that can help you with any of the challenges listed in the survey, go to Learning to be Great. 

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Organizational Learning Tools

Tools of a Learning Organization

Meetings: Love Them or Leave Them

Why is it that after all that has been said and written about wasteful meetings, managers continue to conduct meetings that are unnecessary and wasteful?  Carson Tate writes in the New York Times:

The meeting culture that is dominating corporate America is unsustainable and unproductive.
How many meetings did you attend last week that didn’t even have an agenda? How many resulted in a new idea? And at how many meetings did you think, “Why am I even here?”

Time is a commodity. And time spent in a meeting should generate a return on investment. But how often do we think about our time that way, and set expectations for meetings to produce real returns? In my experience working with Fortune 500 companies, the answer is rarely. This is just one result of a meeting-intensive culture.

This problem is not new and neither are the solutions. The famous John Cleese video, Meetings Bloody Meetings, was first produced in 1976 and dramatizes humorously the ineffectiveness of most meetings. As I have written in previous posts, meetings are overused and under-designed. We can no longer afford to have meetings just because that’s what we do at 1:00 on Mondays, or because the planning committee has something to report, or because the COO wants to announce a new policy. These are not good reasons to bring people together, wasting their time and energy. 

Technology has been both a blessing and a curse when it comes to meetings. On the one hand, location is no longer a barrier to group conversations. Smart phones, tablet computers, and laptops are all devices that allow people to participate in meetings remotely. On the other hand, meetings can be called with little planning and often with little consideration whether this is the best use of everyone's time.

In his 2003 book, Making Meetings Work: Achieving High Quality Group Decisions, John Tropman offers
very practical advice on how to have a useful meeting. His research on this problem found that when leaders had successful meetings they almost always had these four features:

1. Their meetings were characterized by decision accomplishment. Decisions got made in these groups. Participants appreciated the sense of closure that almost always occurred.
2. There was little decision rework. The group did not have to get together to decide again something that had already been decided or, as likely, had been avoided.
3. The decisions were good. There was a feeling, buttressed by reality as time passed, that the work of the group was of high quality. These were not just decisions made to “get something done.” They were thoughtful and reasoned, and they were actions that made a difference to the bureau, company, or agency.
4. People had fun! These were meetings that participants looked forward to. There was a sense of enjoyment and involvement. Participants felt that their time was well spent. They felt the meeting they were in was the “real” meeting. It was an authentic team experience.

Meetings can be productive, meaningful, and fun. However, this requires leadership that is intentional about the design and facilitation of these gatherings. Meetings should have a plan, involve group decision-making, and create a collective sense of accomplishment. Otherwise, there is no need to meet. 

Learning and Performance Improvement in 2013

The Internet Time Alliance principals have made predictions for 2013. Charles Jennings offers this picture for the year:

A confluence of technology and improved connectivity, increasing pressures for rapid solutions and better customer service, and demands for higher performance, will force the hands of many HRDs and CLOs to refocus from models of ‘extended formal training’ to place technology-enabled, workplace-focused and leader-led development approaches at the core of their provision.

Clark Quinn predicts that “…we’ll see more examples of the notion of a ‘performance ecosystem’ of resources aligned around individual needs and responsibilities, instead of organized around the providing silos.” While he expects greater use of mobile devices to support individual needs and responsibilities, he thinks many organizations will fail to use these methods effectively.

Harold Jarche reminds us that “…work is learning and learning is the work in the network era…” However, he also believes that most organizations will continue to deliver formal courses and instructor-led training programs.

Jane Hart says that no matter what IT and T&D departments continue to do, individuals and teams will find ways to bypass these units and use technology to access what they need when they need it.

Jay Cross, similar to Jarche, argues that because of the speed and complexity of change, “Learning will continue to converge with work. Increasingly, workers will learn their jobs by doing their jobs.” He believes that “smart companies” will recognize the need for a management style that supports this kind of learning.

This group of thought-leaders seems to envision a world that is making strides away from classroom-based, formal learning and towards informal, social, mobile learning. My prediction is that 2013 will be a time of sorting out instructional delivery methods, with mobile devices taking center stage. But I don’t think there will be much overall gain in support of learning. The economic and legal pressures on organizations, perceived and imagined, will prevent most from adapting to the technological, social, and demographic changes that are going on around them.

To make learners accountable for their own learning, to push down responsibility for learning to customer-facing employees and project teams, and to engage workers in continuous performance improvement, means admitting that the way managers have been doing things might not be best for employees and it means giving up centralized control. This is difficult stuff for CEOs and other managers to accept.

So, while I hope the ITA prognosticators are right (Full disclosure: I have co-founded a business to support individual, team, whole organization, and community learning.), I’m afraid that 2013 is not going to be a year of substantive change in our organizations. Executives will talk a good game, and may even look like they are adapting to the new reality, but when faced with a choice most will opt for the familiar and safe path. 

A Year of “The Performance Improvement Blog” in Review

It’s time to do a little year-end reflecting on my blog posts from 2012.

Throughout last year I used this blog to illuminate important leadership and management issues. The topics ranged from creating a learning culture to increasing employee engagement to improving organizational communication to evaluating executive coaching, and more.

Out of all of these blog posts I’ve selected five that seem to have had the most interest for readers. Here are the links with a short excerpt from each post:

How to Create a Learning Culture in Organizations - Organizational learning is not about training. Rather, it's about a community of workers sharing in a process of constantly seeking improvement through new knowledge, new skills, and new applications of knowledge and skills to achieving the goals of the organization. They examine what they do, compare that to what needs to be done, reflect on what they have learned, and make the needed change in the organization.

 

Leaders Make or Break Employee Engagement - A leader’s attitude and behavior determine whether an organization has an engaged workforce or not. In other words, what leaders think and feel and say and do has a profound impact on employee satisfaction, enthusiasm for their work, desire to do their best, and commitment to go beyond their job descriptions every day. In an article for The Business Thinker, my colleague Jim Stilwell and I describe 13 ways in which leaders affect employee engagement. 

 

 

What Gets Measured Gets Done...Revisited - Measurement is not enough. An organization has to do something with those metrics in order to “get done” what needs to get done, i.e., organizational learning, performance improvement, and change. The act of measuring things like sales, customer service, product quality, teamwork, employee engagement, or learning, does not necessarily mean that anything will be done differently.

 

 

Why Evaluate Executive Coaching - CEOs and Boards are beginning to ask if the substantial investment they are making in executive coaching is paying off.  Unfortunately, we don’t know much about the impact of coaching. Studies tend to rely on surveys of executives who are being coached. But this method of studying coaching is fraught with problems.

 

 

What Do You Mean? - Dan Pallotta, president of Advertising for Humanity and HBR blogger, in a post titled “I Don't Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore”, writes about business jargon and how it affects communication in organizations. The blog post must have hit a nerve because it has broken the record for most comments to a single HBR Blog Network post. 

Wishing you a healthy and prosperous 2013!

Learning to be Great Organizations

In a previous post, I wrote about the importance of democratizing organizational learning. I argued that organizations need to be continuously learning for the purpose of improving performance and achieving business goals. And in another post I wrote that for this to happen, organizational leaders need tools. That is, they need methods for learning from the organization and for learning how to learn from the organization. I wrote, “If we are going to democratize learning in organizations, we need to teach everyone how to learn and how to use tools to discover useful information. We need to make learning tools accessible to all employees when and where they need them.”

Developers of organizational learning tools, whether they be faculty, internal leaders, or free agents, have very few outlets for getting those tools to the people who need them in a fast and cost-effective way. Major publishing houses take too long, cost too much, and have limited distribution channels. Penelope Trunk addresses this problem in her blog post, “From PR to profits: the problems with publishing.” One could challenge her motivation for writing the piece, but her criticism of traditional book publishing, from my experience, is accurate.

Many tools, such as employee surveys, graphical representations of models, or steps to solving organizational problems, do not require a book. These tools could be made available in shorter forms and without all the trappings of a best seller. However, simply posting materials on the author’s Web site is not the answer either.

Another avenue for distribution is professional associations. These guilds develop and sell their own materials as a major source of revenue. They often work with a select cadre of member-authors and the products can be quite pricey. The American Evaluation Association is an exception to this with their AEA365 blog, a vehicle for any member to post an article and links to related resources. It is intended to be a free exchange of information and tools among members. The Employee Engagement Network is another example of a place to share information about tools for improving performance, specifically by increasing employee engagement. Although both sites serve an important purpose, neither is designed for authors to publish tools or for managers to find what they need when they need it.

It is wonderful that many free resources are available within professional communities. However, an alternative is needed where creators of organizational improvement tools can distribute those tools quickly and easily to any leader when and where those tools are needed.  And to make high quality tools available, creators must be compensated, even in a small way, for their expertise and effort. This is the space that my business partners and I hope to fill with Learning2BGreat.com.  Anyone who has created materials that can be used for organizational improvement may sell their wares from the site. The author decides what it is worth and sets the price. Anyone who needs a tool to help them help their organization may purchase and download the appropriate tool from the site. The tools are organized in topics and linked to information about the authors. L2BG is a virtual marketplace for connecting professional resources with the people who need them, on-demand. This ecommerce site is an experiment that we hope will continue to grow and have a profound effect on improving organizations of all types. 

Culture and Creativity

Workplace culture is the "what", "why", and "how" of organization. It is what work is being done and what resources the organization has to do that work, why that work is being done and how those reasons are communicated to employees, and how people work together and make decisions. Meghan Biro, in a blog post for Forbes titled "Your Employees Are Engaged...REALLY?", makes a distinction between the "what" and "why" of workplace culture. While I agree that employee engagement is heightened when employees know why things are done the way they are done (for example, work environment, benefits, promotions), managers must also pay attention to how things are done. Dov Seidman explains this concept in his book, How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything. He says, for example, in a self-governance culture: 

People at all levels of the company are trusted to act on their own initiative and to collaboratively innovate; a shared purpose and common values guide employee and company behavior.

Examples of "how" are offered in Marla Gottschalk's blog post How to Develop a More Creative Workplace. She gives some excellent suggestions for how managers can promote creativity. For example, she recommends giving employees a notebook for recording their thoughts and ideas about customers, products, and processes. By doing the things she suggests and making the time and space for these activities, management is communicating the message that they value everyone and need everyone's input in order to be a successful organization. This is powerful. In addition to collecting creative ideas for new products, improving customer service, and solving problems, it is likely that employees will feel more valued and be more motivated to work hard and do their best in that culture. Soon the expectation is set and nurtured that this is a company in which everyone works hard and does their best. 

I recently had the pleasure of visiting Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This is a software development company that has aligned its culture with its business goals. They have found that to produce creative, useful solutions for their customers, they need to support a particular kind of work environment. They describe that culture in this way:

The Menlo Way^TM is defined by JOY through the following practices:

• pairing; no one works alone
• High-Tech Anthropology^R
• open and collaborative workspace
• high speed voice technology^TM
• daily stand up
• 40 hour work weeks
• pets and babies at work
• making mistakes faster
• doing the simplest thing that could possibly work
• origami project management
• work authorization boards; storycards, yarn, and stickers
• estimation without fear
• integrated quality advocacy
• test-driven development

Clearly, how people work together and support each other is considered to be essential to the success of Menlo. They value collaboration and creativity and nurture a culture that communicates these values. 

In an interview that Dave Summers did with fomer Corning Glass exec Lina Echeverría, she is quoted as saying:

I was reading a website that was talking about the different rules for innovation. Many people have said "You should do this, you should do that, you should expect, you should choose from, you should know how to select", but if you do not have the culture that believes that innovation is everybody's role...not only that..that innovation is accessible to everybody. If you do not have that culture that says "I am also creative and I'm empowered to use that creativity as part of the overall goals of the organization, then you don't have much.

Processes can be wonderful, but they are not the real driver. The real driver is that culture that says "Let's make it happen!"

This is why I think culture is so important to an engaged, creative workforce. How you do your work says volumes about what leaders value. It's not "pets and babies at work" or jelly beans on every desk or shuffleboard in the employee lounge. What matters is the message that the culture communicates to employees. When done right, employees feel like management cares what they think and that what they do matters to the success of the company.

Why Learn?

Why should you keep on learning? You have a college degree, maybe a terminal degree such as MBA or Ph.D. You have a job that you know how to do and you’re good at it. You get a regular paycheck, and, if you’re lucky, have a long-term contract and stock options. Other than your supplier’s new products and services, what is there left to learn?

Learning and work have merged. Izzy Justice, founder and CEO of EQMentor, Inc. writes: “…the successful working professional will not be the one who has accomplished a lot in the past, but the one who is constantly learning.” Whether it’s learning something new, unlearning something old, or learning how to learn, all employees, from front-line technicians to C-suite executives, need to make learning part of their jobs.

You know the trends. Technology is changing the way we work and putting information literally at our fingertips. Globalization is changing where we work and who are our competitors; they could be anywhere in the world and could crop up overnight. A demand for transparency in all institutions has made a high degree of ethics and compliance an essential part of doing business. Expectations of corporate leaders is to do more with less which means that employees need to be smarter about their jobs and how they do them.  Networking using social media is breaking down silos and building options for sharing information and know-how but it also is a capability that needs to be developed.

These trends are putting pressure on all employees for continually acquiring new knowledge and skills. Tim Hoff, of American Trainco, offers these eight reasons for continuous learning:

1. To enhance skills, especially those not fully developed in school or prior experience.

2. To provide job security by increasing value to company

3. To increase career options within and outside current employer

4. To improve adaptability to changes in organization and industry

5. To achieve more professional success

6. To have higher job satisfaction

7. To increase income

8. To stay current with industry trends and best practices

Vincent Belliveau, general manager at Cornerstone OnDemand, links continuous learning to employee engagement, which, he argues, results in greater productivity, reduced turnover, and a better company reputation. This link between employee engagement and company success appears to be supported by research.

Andres Fortino of DeVry College of New York, writing in The Evolllution, makes the distinction between training and education. Learners will benefit from both training and education. He writes: “To keep up and to advance it is imperative that professionals engage in some form of continuing education or they will soon find themselves less in demand.”

The solution is creating a culture of learning in organizations that utilizes external education courses, workplace formal training, workplace informal training, and opportunities for feedback and reflection that help employees learn from their workplace activity. Organizations need to support continuous learning continuously. The key to this is having managers who encourage, facilitate, and reward learning by their direct reports.

 

Does Employee Engagement Predict Market Value?

Evidence suggests that highly engaged employees are, as the Madison Performance Group would say, “brand ambassadors,” who contribute to selling the products and services of a company. Madison implies a causal link between employee engagement and market value, profit, and ROI. Their reasoning is that engaged employees speak positively about the products and services of their companies which increases sales. This thinking is represented in very concise form by the elegant infographic brought to my attention by a TLNT blog post and shown below.

I would introduce a couple of caveats to this picture. First, Madison’s business is “employee engagement and sales incentive marketing” so they have a self-serving interest in portraying a causal link between programs that increase engagement and bottom-line results. The other caveat is that although it makes sense, we should be very cautious in assuming a one-way causal link between happy employees and financial performance. It could be that high quality products and strong sales cause employee engagement, not the other way around. Or it could be that a third factor, such as reputation in the marketplace causes both high employee engagement (e.g., company attracts enthusiastic job applicants) and increased sales.  Prius owners probably recycle more than non-Prius owners; that doesn’t mean that buying a Prius causes people to recycle, or that recycling causes people to buy a Prius.

In any case, the infographic is a useful tool for having a conversation in your organization about workplace culture. Anyway you draw it, studies support the notion that employee engagement is probably a significant contributing factor to company performance.  My point is simply: don’t assume that if you energize workers you will energize sales, but also don’t assume that you can have a successful company over the long run without high levels of employee engagement.