The Performance Improvement Blog

Workplace Frustration Trumps Engagement

A frustrating work environment trumps engagement every time, especially for the most motivated and committed employees. This is the theme of a webinar (see video) that David Zinger, of the Employee Engagement Network, did with Mark Royal of the Hay Group and co-author of The Enemy of Engagement. Just when we thought engagement was the end-all and be-all of high performance, we hear that engagement without enablement will get us nowhere.

Enemy of Engagement from David Zinger on Vimeo.

 

Of course, it makes perfect sense when you think about it. High performing employees are easy to take for granted. They’re working hard, going the extra mile, and excited about what they do.  Yet, this is the group for which you should be most concerned. According to Hay Group research, 20% of them are feeling a level of frustration that will cause them to either cease being productive or leave the company. In this current environment of economic recovery, the choice of leaving is becoming easier and more attractive. Why would top performers stay and feel frustrated when they have options elsewhere?

Mark Royal describes the problem in this way:

The enemy of engagement in our terms is workplace frustration…we’re not talking about the rumblings and grumblings over tiny annoyances… the most engaged and committed people are the most ripe for feelings of frustration. Dissatisfied, turned off, disaffected, disengaged people can shrug off their inability to get things done…for motivated people who are highly committed to organizational objectives, those kinds of obstacles that they might trip over in the work environment cause a lot of discomfort and anxiety and that feeling of frustration that strikes those motivated and engaged people can really, over time, undermine motivation and commitment levels.

If managers truly want to retain the most engaged and committed employees, they must remove obstacles that cause frustration. These obstacles include:

• Inadequate training and training that is not aligned with business goals
• Lack of equipment to do their jobs
• Lack of a clear understanding of goals and objectives
• Lack of a shared understanding of priorities
• Not knowing boundaries of decision-making authority
• Ineffective work processes
• Work structures not aligned with business goals

Emphasizing employee engagement without removing these obstacles will only increase frustration and not produce the kind of environment in which the most talented and committed employees thrive. They might love their work and be committed to the mission of the organization, but if they can’t achieve their goals because of factors beyond their control, they will feel enormous frustration and, in an improving economy, look for greener pastures elsewhere. 

 

Time To Get Cultured

This article was originally published in The EvoLLLution.

The biggest workplace hurdle to identifying and assessing development and training needs is lack of a “learning culture.” Organizational culture is defined as the values, assumptions, beliefs, behaviors, and norms of the enterprise, sometimes referred to as the organization’s DNA. Culture influences priorities, decisions, performance management, incentives (praise, reward, promotion, etc.), allocation of time and effort, morale, and engagement. If learning is not valued within the culture of an organization, if learning is not woven into the fabric of the workplace, then learning needs will not be identified and addressed in a way that helps the organization achieve its goals.

In most organizations today the training and development function is marginalized. Responsibility for learning is given to a department (HR, Training, CLO, etc.). Managers assume that anything employees need to learn will be provided by someone else; someone assigned to the training role. Assessment of need typically occurs when there is new equipment, new procedures, or new strategies and the organization’s training professionals are made aware of these changes. Or, in many cases, training and development are opportunistic activities based on no assessment at all, occurring only when the timing and cost of an event fits the availability of an employee. Assessment, when it does occur, is not strategic. It is not aligned with the business goals of the organization and, therefore, has limited value.

In a truly learning culture, learning and performance improvement are valued and supported throughout the organization. In this kind of organization, learning and performance improvement are frequent topics of leaders’ speeches and writing. Employees at all levels are given the time and resources to acquire new knowledge and skills that will contribute to performance improvement. Employees are recognized and rewarded for learning and using that learning to achieve important business results for the organization. Leaders are recognized and rewarded for supporting the learning of their direct reports.

Leaders need to ask themselves, “Does our culture support learning? Do we have every-day processes and procedures in place to ensure that learning and change are embedded in the way we work together? Do our top leaders make continuous learning a priority and communicate this throughout the organization?”

Assessment in this kind of culture identifies what individuals, teams, and the organization as a whole need to learn in order to achieve the goals of the enterprise. Assessment in this kind of culture determines how best to help people attain this knowledge and develop these competencies. Assessment in this kind of culture brings to awareness the support system that will help employees apply their learning on the job and improve their performance. Assessment in this kind of culture gives the organization feedback on its readiness for change.

It is this “learning culture” for which organizations should be striving. The periodic assessment of needs by a training department is not enough. Training events (workshops, courses (classroom or elearning), seminars, conferences, etc.) have never been particularly effective at improving performance by themselves. Estimates are that only 10% to 50% of learners continue to apply new knowledge and skills to their jobs after training. This has been true even while the quality of the content and delivery of training events have improved markedly. Therefore, needs assessment should examine all of the factors in an organization’s culture that are barriers to learning and performance improvement. In this time of economic contraction all resources must be used efficiently and effectively. We need to focus on developing a learning culture, not on deciding which training events to deliver.

IMAGE BY VISUAL ARTIST FRANK BONILLA 

The 0% Solution to Learning

Ideally, organizations should be striving for a culture in which every aspect of the workplace supports continuous individual, team, and whole organization learning. It should be a place where Individuals are learning how to help the organization achieve its strategic goals, where teams are learning how to help the organization achieve its strategic goals, and where the organization as a whole is learning how to achieve its strategic goals.

In this kind of culture, formal classroom training is superfluous. The most important learning occurs in the conversations that employees have with their supervisors and co-workers, in the conversations that teams have about team development and effectiveness, and in whole organization experiences with problem solving and planning. Learning occurs from the feedback and reflection around individual, team, and whole organization successes and failures. Learning occurs because of a performance management system that permeates every aspect of organizational life, not because of isolated instructor-based courses, workshops, and seminars.

Robert O. Brinkerhoff makes this point in his writing about measuring the contribution that training makes to learning and performance improvement. He argues that the isolation score, that indicator of how much training contributes to performance results, should be zero. He writes:

An isolation score of zero, on the other hand, seems to me to be the perfect solution: it means the organization has figured out a way to drive a desired performance improvement and resultant business result solely by manipulating the performance system, so there is no need for any training at all. Isn't this scenario exactly what the performance-oriented practitioners would seek? Training is always an expensive solution. If you can get to the desired business outcome without spending a dime on training - by just adjusting incentives, motivation, performance support, etc. - isn’t this what a thoughtful HRD leader should strive for?

The implication of striving for an “isolation score of zero” is that the whole organization owns learning, not just HR and the CLO, and when the organization needs performance improvement, training is not the first course of action. We have to change the way we think about learning and performance improvement, especially as people need to learn faster and achieve better results.

Unfortunately, it’s a very difficult mental model to change. In a recent post on ASTD’s Learning Circuits Blog, Connie Malamed asks, “What do you think the future role of the training professional will be?” She offers this model of future roles:

Malamed's model is an accurate representation of the current state of things but not where I think the field needs to go in the future. My model would not include “design and create courses.” My model would put “align learning with the strategic goals of the organization” at the center and “create a culture of learning throughout the organization” as the next key role. We have so many learning support options now, including just-in-time elearning (desktop and mobile), coaching, mentoring, simulations, on-demand video, experiential learning, internships, and on and on, that we rarely need to develop courses. Learning and development professionals need to be focused on performance results, not on training. 

 

Bad News is Good News

When evaluating programs and organizations, bad news can be good news. What I mean by that is any feedback is helpful to an organization if leaders listen to the feedback, look for value in the information, and make improvements accordingly. However, what so often happens is that leaders immediately become defensive and look for ways to discredit or cast doubt on criticism. Almost impulsively, they look for ways to find fault with negative feedback and only accept high ratings and praise. The tendency is to automatically try to identify the people who made critical comments and explain away what was said because of who said it: “They’re always complaining”; “That person is poisoning the well for everyone else”; “We couldn’t give them raises this year so they’re angry”; and on and on.

Some organizations have a culture that is so insular they can’t hear bad news. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), “founded more than one hundred years ago as a way to protect student-athletes”, appears to be one of these organizations. In a series of columns written for the New York Times, Joe Nocera has described some examples of the NCAA failing to act in the best interests of students. He writes:

The N.C.A.A. claims — as it always does — that it is acting to protect its athletes “from exploitation by professional and commercial enterprises.” But this is classic N.C.A.A. Orwellian spin. Its true purpose in preventing athletes from engaging with agents while in college is to exacerbate their exploitation. The professional and commercial enterprise doing the exploiting, of course, is college sports itself.

I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the facts that Nocera cites, but it does seem that the NCAA is not making use of this opportunity to look at itself in the mirror and make improvements. Rather than accepting the feedback and explaining what they will do to make the NCAA a better organization for students and its member institutions, organizational leaders have become defensive and have attacked Nocera in the press. Dave Pickle, a long-time employee of the NCAA, wrote a blog post about Nocera titled, “News not fit to print.”

This isn’t a constructive response, especially by an organization that has responsibility not only to its member institutions but also to the wider public.  One of the primary ways in which organizations learn is by periodically examining what they do and what stakeholder’s (customers/clients, employees, suppliers, wider community, etc.) think of what they do. If leaders do not listen to the “bad” as well as the “good”, they cannot learn. Barriers to listening, such as the argumentum ad hominem defense, do not allow for continuous improvement. Like the NCAA, a culture can develop in organizations in which these barriers become ingrained in the way they do business. “Bad news” should provide an opportunity for learning and change. Great organizations turn bad news into news they can use.

 

Evaluate Learning Process

As organizations evaluate their programs and services they need to pay attention to process as well as outcomes. Catherine (Brehm) Rain, of Rain and Brehm Consulting Group, Inc., writes this in aea365:

Process evaluation ensures you answer questions of fidelity… did you do what you set out to with respect to needs, population, setting, intervention and delivery? When these questions are answered, a feedback loop is established so that necessary modifications to the program or the evaluation can be made along the way.

Life is a journey—and so is a long-term evaluation. Stuff happens. However, it is often in the chaotic that we find the nugget of truth, the unknown need, or a new direction to better serve constituents. A well-documented process evaluation assists programs to ‘turn on a dime’, adapt to changing environments and issues, and maximize outcome potential.

The problem with much of the evaluation that goes on in organizations, whether that’s evaluation of training and development programs, communication programs, marketing campaigns, a new sales approach, or strategic planning, is that the process is not examined. You might discover what participants thought of the program from “smile sheets” and you might even know how participants applied what they learned if you are fortunate enough to do a follow-up assessment, but none of this tells you what happened and what could be changed to achieve greater impact in the future. This is what process evaluation does.

If you tell me that you provided coaching, or diversity training, or emotional intelligence training, or relationship selling, that doesn’t tell me what actually happened. These interventions could be very different from organization to organization, from department to department, or from day to day. Even if an organization implements a highly structured program such as The Fish! Philosophy with its video, guidebook, playbook, and accessories, the experience could be very different for participants in different organizations with different facilitators at different times. To assess its value to the organization and improve the program for future audiences, we have to know what happened and how that was experienced by participants.

It’s like a friend telling you that she went to Las Vegas, Nevada for a vacation and had a good time. If that’s all you know, then you don’t know very much about her trip. You couldn’t replicate her experience or improve on it for yourself. Maybe she stayed on the Strip and spent every waking moment gambling in casinos. Or maybe she stayed downtown and spent each day on Hoover Dam, Red Rock, and Grand Canyon sight-seeing trips without ever setting foot in a casino. Both experiences might receive a “five” on the vacation evaluation form but that data would be useless to you until you knew what “Las Vegas Vacation” means in her case.

So too with learning interventions, whether classroom, online, or informal, we need to know the actual process of learning (anticipated and unanticipated) in those situations in order to improve the experience for other learners and maximize impact on organizations. It is insufficient to know outcomes without knowing what happened to achieve those outcomes. 

I’ve evaluated employee training programs that included follow-up coaching. Some participants used the coaching and some did not. Some coaching consisted of several, hour-long sessions and some consisted of 15 to 20 minute sessions. Some coaching was done by phone, some was done online and asynchronous, and some was done face-to-face. Some coaching was learner-centered and some was coach-centered. Without knowing how the actual coaching process was delivered, we shouldn’t be making decisions about the program.

Lately, the trend in the employee training and development industry has been to emphasize measurement of results and ROI. While I applaud this recognition that end-of-program, smile sheets are an inadequate measure of the quality of programs, I think measuring outcomes without describing the factors that contributed to those outcomes is also inadequate. We need both process and outcome evaluation. 

 

There They Go Again: Bashing Brainstorming

What did brainstorming ever do to receive such vitriol? Jonah Lehrer writes in the January 30 issue of The New Yorker:

Typically, participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contribution. The whiteboard has been filled with free associations. At such moments, brainstorming can seem like an ideal mental technique, a feel-good way to boost productivity. But there is one overwhelming problem with brainstorming. It doesn’t work.

Susan Cain writes in a January 13 opinion piece for the New York Times titled “The Rise of the New Group Think”:

…brainstorming sessions are one of the worst possible ways to stimulate creativity. The brainchild of a charismatic advertising executive named Alex Osborn who believed that groups produced better ideas than individuals, workplace brainstorming sessions came into vogue in the 1950s. …But decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases… People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure.

And now Cliff Kuang raises concerns with brainstorming again in an article for Fast Company titled, The Brainstorming Process Is B.S. But Can We Rework It? At least Kuang is asking how to make brainstorming more effective. Let’s brainstorm some possibilities (just kidding).

As I wrote in a previous blog post, “I believe the problem is in the implementation, not the method.” Indicting brainstorming is like saying that elearning is more effective than classroom-based learning. The truth is there is effective elearning and there is ineffective elearning. It all depends on the purpose, design, content, and delivery of the course.  

It’s the same with brainstorming. It all depends on the quality of design and facilitation. The critics are right; if all the facilitator does is allow participants to free associate for an hour and then go home, the process is “B.S.”. When that happens we can predict little creativity and little impact on planning.

However, when it is done well, when it is done in context and with preparation of participants, and when there is follow-up after the initial generation of ideas, then brainstorming can be very effective. A good facilitator:

1. Is clear about the purpose and intended results of the exercise and discusses this with participants
2. Prepares (even trains) participants for doing brainstorming (e.g., gives an example)
3. Establishes norms for how participants are to behave in the session
4. Leads the conversation in such a way that gets everyone involved, gets all of the ideas displayed in front of the group, and does not allow criticism until all ideas are listed
5. Helps the group reach consensus on a subset of ideas on which to do further work
6. Begins action planning to do the follow-up work
7. Helps participants learn (and learn how to learn) from their involvement

There is an art and science to brainstorming. The facilitator must be able to follow the rules of brainstorming but also deviate from and expand on those rules depending on the situation.  

When done well, there are many uses of brainstorming. It could be used to evaluate a program, consider new strategies and methods, identify problems, create a vision for the future of an organization, or solve problems.  Often, brainstorming is used simply to warm up the group for a lengthy strategic-planning or prolbem-solving discussion. The technique creates an atmosphere of trust where everyone is heard and all ideas are respected. Now, what’s wrong with that?