All Posts Tagged With: "employee engagement"
MEDRAD: 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 2009. Its global customer satisfaction ratings using Net Promoter Score, a measure of customer loyalty (click here to learn more), increased from 50% in 2001 to 63% in 2010, surpassing the best-in-class benchmark of 50%.
MEDRAD achieves…
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 the economy as mortgage and car payments and spending on groceries, gasoline, and other essentials, all of which help stimulate the economy.
Excessive executive compensation sends a clear message to employees that leaders will reap most…
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 to wish things were better: Coach them in how they can make things better. Don’t accept their narrow views about the nature of problems: Challenge them to take responsibility for understanding and improving performance in…
22Nov2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedUnderstanding Employee Requirements
When asked to identify their key stakeholders, Baldrige Award winners include employees on the list. In 1997, 2008 Baldrige Award recipient Poudre Valley Health System surveyed its employees and asked:
- What makes you want to jump out of bed and come to work?
- How do we build a culture that supports that?
Two years later, PVHS collaborated with Colorado State University to identify key staff requirements, which became the framework for its semiannual Employee Culture Survey. The requirements are:
- Teamwork and cooperation
- Safety in innovating
- Listening to each other
- Respect and fairness
- Enthusiasm
- Feedback and accountability
- Resources and participation
It’s hard to find anything unusual about this list. What is unusual is the systematic approach PVHS used to identify these requirements and how it has continued to refine the list–and what it means–ever since.
As with customer requirements, it’s easy to assume you know what is required to engage and satisfy your employees. Such assumptions are dangerous. PVHS knows what its employees require and it acts on that knowledge to improve both engagement and satisfaction.
Workforce engagement is a PVHS core competency and is measured on its semiannual survey. In 2007, PVHS was as good as or better than the top 10% nationwide in four survey questions on engagement and in the top 10% on 11 of 16 attitude areas.
Based on results, it’s clear PVHS knows what its employees want.
To find out more about Poudre Valley Health System, read its award application summary.
To read more about employee engagement, click on…
4Nov2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedResurrecting the Suggestion System
A suggestion system is an idea whose time has come—again. It sounds archaic: Little boxes protruding from the wall in different parts of the building with an invitation to submit your idea and a slot for dropping it into the box. Most gathered more dust than ideas, which is why most companies nixed their suggestion systems.
In “Workers of the World, Innovate” (Businessweek, September 7, 2010), Rachael King introduces the next generation of suggestion systems that, naturally, use software rather than little boxes to solicit ideas. The software collects, surveys, sorts, analyzes, and even helps prioritize ideas. AT&T has 40,000 employees signed up for The Innovation Pipeline, and its senior executives fund a handful of the best ideas each quarter.
From a Baldrige perspective, a suggestion system is a good indicator of the quality of your management system in two key areas:
- Employee engagement. Suggestion systems fail because employees ignore them. If your organization has a suggestion system and it’s getting one idea a week, either your employees are not engaged in helping your organization improve or you’ve done a terrible job of promoting your suggestion system. Wainwright Industries, which won the Baldrige Award in 1994, boasted 54 implemented ideas per employee per year! That’s more than one implemented idea per employee per week! Wainwright’s employees are fully engaged in making their company better. According to experts in this area, employees are motivated to be engaged—and to submit suggestions for improvement—by…
Overcompensated Leaders and Their Tools
According to the Institute for Policy Studies, American CEOs make 263 times the average compensation for American workers. The average pay for CEOs is eight times what it was in 1970 while American workers are taking home less in real weekly wages than they were in the 1970s.
Most Americans seem to be okay with that. A good number want to extend the tax cuts for these rich folks for reasons that escape me. And we all know the inequities will only continue to grow: The system for paying CEOs is broken beyond repair since the people in control of the system, who are the CEOs and their boardroom buddies, are the ones who benefit from it.
Randall Stephenson, the CEO of AT&T, made more than $20 million in 2009 while laying off around 12,000 people. Many Americans, including a good number of workers who are making less now than they or their parents did in 1970, seem to care more about protecting Mr. Stephenson’s right to earn and keep as much money as he can than about the 12,000 people who lost their jobs because of his management team’s incompetence. Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg only earned around $17 million in 2009 but he laid off more than 21,000 folks. William Weldon at Johnson & Johnson had total compensation in 2009 of $25,569,844 and his company laid off nearly 9,000 people.
These obscene compensation packages are only going…
2Sep2010 | Steve George | 2 comments | ContinuedEmployee Hierarchy of Needs
Money isn’t everything, especially when it comes to motivating employees—but it’s also not irrelevant.
Chip Conley’s Joie de Vivre hotel chain in the San Francisco Bay area struggled after 9/11. In an interview on FastCompany’s Web site (click here), Conley talks about turning to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid to understand how to connect to the higher needs of employees, customers, and investors. He developed an employee pyramid with three basic themes: “survival at the base, succeed at the middle, and transformation at the top. Applying that to employees, it’s money, recognition, and meaning.”
Conley and his leaders worked on building a culture of recognition and meaning:
- Senior leaders ended their meetings on a positive note.
- They created an environment of recognition throughout the organization.
- They made a rule that the person giving recognition needs to be from a different department than the person being recognized.
- They added questions to the twice-annual work climate surveys measuring performance on the top-of-the-pyramid attributes.
- They held offsite retreats with line level employees to promote recognition and instill meaning.
- They measured relationships to help evaluate manager effectiveness.
Joie de Vivre’s focus on the employee pyramid seems to have produced results: It was named one of the top ten “Best Places to Work in the Bay Area for the fifth year in 2010.
One note of caution: Recognition and meaning cannot replace fair pay. Wages in this country have been stagnant for so long, and jobs are so hard to come…
26Aug2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
