All Posts Tagged With: "employee engagement"
Get The Baldrige Edge
My focus for the past twenty years has been on understanding how the Baldrige model gives those who use it a competitive edge, not just at the organizational level but at the personal level… Because there’s something different about these strategic performers that gives them an advantage over the short-term plodders around them.
I’ve written four books on the Baldrige model and worked with five Baldrige Award winners and with Baldrige experts in dozens of organizations. I’ve studied how they think and act and have discovered the secrets that transform them from plodders to strategic performers.
Right here, right now, you can secure your job…make it better…and advance your career with The Baldrige Edge.
Whether you are an employee, manager, or leader, there are two ways to look at achieving your goals at work. You can either think like a short-term plodder and believe that your organization will recognize your talents and hard work and reward you…eventually…maybe… OR you can start acting like a strategic performer, knowing that you will get ahead by taking charge of your job and your career. As a strategic performer, you ask the right questions. You provide insightful answers. You stop wasting your days on the same old drudgery,…
12Jan2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige and Process Improvement
“Have you seen process owners or other organizational structures that sustain cross-functional process improvement?”
Brad Power poses this question at the end of his article, “Where Have All the Process Owners Gone?” (HBR, January 7, 2011). Anyone who’s been following Baldrige.com or been involved with integrating Baldrige or evaluating Baldrige assessments knows that some of this country’s best examples of “organizational structures that sustain cross-functional process improvement” are Baldrige Award winners.
The Baldrige model is a process model. The first six of seven categories in the Baldrige Criteria ask how you design, manage, and improve your key processes, while the seventh category requests the results of those processes. Each Baldrige Award winner has found its own way to improve processes, some of which include process owners and most of which use similar quality tools and techniques.
They have also developed systematic approaches to sustaining process improvement. Power bemoans the fact that too many organizations attempt process improvement by establishing process owners, only to revert to functional management in the end. He suggests six reasons for this; none of these reasons hold true at Baldrige Award winners.
- Attention shifted. Organizations lose their focus on process improvement when senior leaders are distracted by new or more urgent issues.…
How Does Your Workplace Measure Up?
When, over a 20-year period, you work with organizations good enough to win a Baldrige Award, you observe several common attributes. Baldrige core values like visionary leadership and management by fact capture some of them, but there are other, less tangible attributes like treating everyone (customers, employees, suppliers, etc.) with respect, never being happy with “good enough,” and a willingness to share—and learn.
Simma Lieberman has made similar observations about excellent workplaces. She helps organizations create inclusive workplaces where employees love to do their best work and customers love to do business. In “Ten Indicators of Morale Level and Employee Involvement” (FastCompany, January 4, 2011), she lists ten “easy to observe behaviors of employees who feel good about their workplace”:
- “There is visible interaction amongst employees in the office, hallways, and cafeteria. People actually smile and say hello to each other. You may even hear laughter.
- You hear people speaking well of each other and their customers. Employees greet customers and stop what they are doing to provide customer service.
- There is resource sharing across work functions, and work groups are not complaining about other departments, or work levels.
- Employees know what other functions do, on a day-to-day level, and how each function impacts the others.
- Employee…
Employee Engagement Boosts Organizational Performance
The Baldrige Criteria reflect current thinking about the best way for an organization to achieve performance excellence both from a systems perspective and in each of the areas within that system. One of these areas is your workforce.
The Baldrige Criteria ask how you engage your workforce to achieve organizational and personal success. The questions about employee engagement probe how you know what engages your employees, how you manage performance to support engagement, how you assess employee engagement, and how you develop your employees to achieve organizational and personal success.
Why is this important? According to a Towers Perrin study of 90,000 employees in 18 countries conducted in 2007-2008, “companies with the most engaged employees had a 19% increase in operating income during the previous year, while those with the lowest levels had a 32% decline.”
Tony Schwartz uses the Towers Perrin study to illustrate his point that “more than 100 studies have now demonstrated a strong relationship between employee engagement and organizational performance. (“What It Takes to Be a Great Employer,” HBR, January 3, 2011). Studies also show that only 20% of employees are fully engaged, 40% are capable but not committed, and 40% are disenchanted and disengaged.
If organizations with the most engaged employees…
3Jan2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedMEDRAD: Win with Your People
“We fight with our products, but we win with our people.”
The quote from Jeff Owoc, senior VP of Operations for MEDRAD, captures a competitive advantage of this two-time Baldrige Award winner, which is featured in “Continuous Improvement Sets Stage for Success” (Adrienne Selko, IndustryWeek, December 22, 2010).
MEDRAD sandwiched its Baldrige Award victories in 2003 and 2010 around recognition as an IW Best Plant in 2007. I worked with MEDRAD on the applications for these awards and saw firsthand how the alignment of its people with its goals and strategies along with its culture of involvement and empowerment drive continuous improvement and market leadership.
MEDRAD manufactures medical devices for diagnosing and treating diseases including fluid injection systems for radiology and cardiology and equipment for visualization procedures such as magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography. When I started working with the company it was independent but is now part of Bayer HealthCare, yet it has maintained its commitment to continuous improvement throughout.
It is the market leader in the U.S. and Europe for most of its products. In many cases, it has more than twice the market share of its leading competitor. Its revenues have grown from $120 million in 1997 to $625 million in…
22Dec2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedSharing the Wealth
“The most successful companies I’ve gotten to know understand that they create the most value when people at every level share in the value they help to create.”
This is the central argument Bill Taylor makes for “Why Nobody Wins Unless Everybody Wins” (HBR, December 7, 2010). His argument happens to be timely with the national debate over tax cuts for millionaires. I’ve railed in previous articles about excessive executive compensation (here, here, and here), which makes those who are not executives cynical about the real value of what they are doing. I also recently read that U.S. companies are now holding onto something like $37 trillion in profits, presumably waiting for the right moment when the recession lets up and they feel free to invest again.
All three of these factors—more of our income gains going to the top one-tenth of one percent than the bottom 60%, executive compensation hundreds of times more than average salaries, and leaders hoarding profits—are key factors in our current economic decline. Study after study has shown that tax cuts for the rich do almost nothing to add jobs: The wealthy just save or invest their extra dough. Tax cuts for everyone else go right back into…
8Dec2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedClose That Open Door
Cy Wakeman has a thought-provoking post on FastCompany that pleads: “Please Kill the Open Door Policy, the Drama Is Killing Us” (November 17, 2010). Every Baldrige Award winner I can think of touts its open door policy. In fact, I can’t think of the last organization I worked with that didn’t have an open door policy. Wakeman thinks it’s a waste of time.
“The practice of the open door has proven to be disastrous,” she writes, noting that it “produces few if any real changes in the organization and often hijacks resources that could be focused on real issues.” Her reasoning is that employees use the open door “to report concerns about others, to tattle, to report their analysis and judgment of coworkers, to provide leaders with a list of things they’d like to see changed in their reality, or even to provide leaders with an evaluation of the leaders’ strengths, weaknesses, and development needs.”
Wakeman believes that, rather than using an open door to hope for change, leaders should “close the door and start developing your people.” Don’t wait for employees to come to you: Schedule time with each employee to talk about their challenges, development needs, and opportunities. Don’t encourage them…
22Nov2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
