All Posts Tagged With: "employee engagement"
Bringing Your Priorities to Life
According to Doug Conant, former CEO of Campbell Soup, “a leader’s job is to take people from where they are today to where they need to be tomorrow and to do so as quickly as possible and in a way that is sustainable.” Conant’s results at Campbell Soup suggest that his leadership approach is effective: The company was the worst performer of all major global food companies when he arrived as CEO in 2001. In 2009 it outperformed the S&P Food Group and the S&P 500.
Along with Mette Norgaard, Conant has written a book about his leadership philosophy called Touchpoints: Creating Powerful Leadership Connections in the Smallest of Moments. IndustryWeek reviews the book here.
In his book, Conant describes how he turned around Nabisco Food Company, his gig before going to Campbell Soup, “with a philosophy of being tough-minded on the standards and tender-hearted with people.” “Some joked that my approach was a cross between Pollyanna and Don Quixote,” he said, “but I have no apologies. The people were highly engaged and delivering excellent results. We grew earnings at a double-digit rate for five straight years. If that’s a sign of weakness, I’ll take it every time.”
He used the same approach—successfully—at Campbell Soup. The approach focuses on TouchPoints, those moments when two or more people get together to deal with an issue and get something done. As the authors write, “in our experience, these TouchPoints are the real work. They are the moments that bring your strategies and priorities to life, the…
13Oct2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhere Are the Disconnects in Your Organization?
This year, Baldrige examiners were asked to assess their organizations using the Baldrige program’s questionnaires: “Are We Making Progress as Leaders?” for examiners who work in management or “Are We Making Progress?” for examiners who do not. The questionnaires ask for level of agreement with statements related to the Baldrige Criteria, in the case of employees, or their perceptions of their organizations, in the case of leaders.
In a few areas, the 173 employees and 294 leaders who took the test differed significantly. These disconnects suggest problems with processes, communication, or both:
- Know how to measure work quality: 78% of employees said they know how while 51% of leaders agreed that they do
- Use work quality measures to make improvements: 74% of employees said they did while 43% of leaders agreed
- Customers are satisfied with work performed: 85% of employees agreed compared to 69% of employees
- My boss and organization care about me: 69% of employees agreed compared to 84% of leaders
It’s important to note that the employees and leaders who answered the questionnaire do not, for the most part, work at the same organizations. And the employees in the group are Baldrige examiners: One would expect them to know how to measure work quality and use those measure to make improvements. If the questionnaires were administered to leaders and employees in one organization, the results might be different.
You can test that theory by rolling out the questionnaire in your organization. If you do, you will still find disconnects between what employees believe and what…
9Sep2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige Model: What are your workforce-focused results?
Item 7.3 in the Baldrige Criteria asks for key results for your workforce environment and engagement. The following examples from Baldrige Award-winning applications show strong current levels, positive trends, and positive comparisons to key benchmarks. To read the descriptions of these measures and to see a broader range of Item 7.3 measures, go to the Results category responses of Baldrige Award-winner applications here. Chart numbers may not correspond to the Item number because of changes to the Criteria.
Baldrige Promotes Resilience
No matter what your organization does, it must be resilient to overcome adversity, whether that adversity comes from a recessionary economy, global competition, runaway healthcare costs, or shrinking budgets in education and government. Baldrige Award winners exemplify resiliency through visionary leadership, employee engagement, open communication, and a focus on the future.
George S. Everly, Jr., PhD is associate professor of psychiatry at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, executive director of Resiliency Science Institutes, and author of Resilient Leadership: When Failure Is Not an Option. In “Building a Resilient Organizational Culture,” he writes that “just as individuals can learn to develop personal traits of resilience, so too can organizations develop a culture of resilience.” This occurs when key leaders demonstrate four core attributes of optimism, decisiveness, integrity, and open communication. When a few leaders model these behaviors, Everly notes, “we believe they have the ability to change an entire culture of an organization as others replicate the resilient characteristics they have observed.”
The framework for changing the culture addresses four areas:
- People prosper from success. Create an environment that makes it possible for people to succeed, especially early in their careers, and then increase the difficulty and complexity of tasks.
- People learn while observing others. Assign new employees to successful work groups so they can experience “vicarious success.”
- People need encouragement, support, and mentoring. “Research suggests that the single most powerful predictor of human resilience is interpersonal support.”
- People need basic training in how to manage personal stress. Everly calls this “developing psychological body armor.”
He concludes with examples of resilient organizations…
27Jun2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedMake Change Happen: 10 Questions
Bob Murphy of Studer Group, a 2010 Baldrige Award winner, recently emailed ten questions to use when beginning a new process or evaluating an existing one. The focus of the questions is as much on changing behavior as it is on process improvement. Studer likes to talk about “hardwiring excellence” in healthcare. These ten questions can help any organization in any industry improve performance:
- Have we set clear and high targets? Will the target cause us to change our behavior?
- Have we provided education/training to all involved in designing or improving the process? Are we over-communicating the “why” behind the intended behavior or improvement?
- Has leadership made it clear that the behavior or new/improved process is mandatory, not optional? Studer Group research of over 2000 healthcare leaders indicates that when you use the word MANDATORY, 98% of employees understand that they MUST do the behavior (or follow the process). When you use the word REQUIRED, only 68% recognize that they MUST do it, and when you use the word EXPECTED, only 26% understand that they must do it. So be clear: This is mandatory!
- Are leaders being role models of the desired behavior? Not modeling it gives employees permission not to follow it either.
- Have we practiced behavior using role-play?
- Do we have a good measure of success?
- Can we report results of the verification of success transparently? Transparency reveals who is succeeding and who needs to improve.
- Are we giving positive feedback when we see the behavior done correctly? Research shows that recognized behavior gets repeated.
- Do we…
Observations from the Front Line
I spent the last month in a cubicle, wearing a tie, working 8 to 4, writing for a large, industry-leading company. This is life for most people but it was new for me, marking the longest stretch going to the same office building in the last 30+ years. I learned a few things about corporate life—and confirmed a few others:
- Wearing a tie sucks. In an age of business casual, wearing a tie feels like going back to the days of “Mad Men” without the glamour. It doesn’t help to have a “casual Friday,” in part because the employees in this division must “earn” it or the head of the division will take it away. Few things damage morale more than treating people like children.
- The company’s mission and vision inspire innovation and excellence in the services it provides. I saw it in the stellar work of the group I was supporting and in the creative solutions the company has developed.
- But…at the corporate level, the mission and vision are secondary to financial considerations. Faced with choosing sides in a national debate about healthcare, the company chose to protect its bottom line rather than fix a broken system. As a result, it will continue to prosper in a system that remains broken, to the detriment of people who could have had better options.
- The CEO makes more in two hours than probably 90% of his employees make in a year. It’s not hard to understand why he likes the status quo, nor is it…
Baldrige Model: How do you engage your workforce to achieve organizational and personal success?
Item 5.2 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how you engage, compensate, and reward employees to achieve high performance. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.
Your organization needs processes for:
- Determining the key factors that affect employee engagement
- Creating a culture and a performance management system that promotes open communication, high-performance work, and an engaged workforce
- Assessing employee engagement and correlating the findings of these assessments with business results to identify opportunities for improvement
- Developing a learning and development system that serves the needs of the organization and the development needs of all employees
- Managing effective career progression and succession planning
Best practices to consider:
- The organization uses employee data from a number of sources including employee surveys, turnover rates, and exit interviews to determine and prioritize employee requirements and then validates those requirements with employees.
- An effective performance management system supports both individual and organizational performance, aligns individual goals/objectives with the organization’s mission and vision, and addresses individual development.
- Employee satisfaction/engagement surveys are done more frequently than the typical annual survey, often with a statistically-valid sample of employees.
- Every employee has a development plan that supports both personal and organizational improvement.
Common problems areas:
- Organizations tend to assume they know what employees require or they rely on generic employee satisfaction surveys to provide a list, but they fail to validate their assumptions.
- No performance management system has been developed.
- Employee surveys are conducted annually and do not address the key factors that affect employee satisfaction and engagement.
- Annual performance reviews…
