All Posts Tagged With: "employee satisfaction"
What Differentiates Baldrige Award Winners (Part 3)
In the first two articles in this series, I described five of the seven characteristics of organizations with sound management systems: (1) they think process; (2) they act on data; (3) they know where they’re going; (4) they align activities; and, (5) they blur boundaries. They exemplify all 11 Baldrige core values but one stands out: They have a systems perspective, which, according to the Baldrige Criteria, “means managing your whole organization, as well as its components, to achieve success.”
They also share these final two characteristics:
6. They treat people well. That means everyone the company touches: employees, customers, suppliers, community members—everyone. The striking difference between companies that treat people as commodities and companies that treat them well was captured in the transformation of Wainwright Industries. In the early 1990s, the leaders of this small Missouri-based manufacturer of machined parts listened to a speaker describe how his company thrived because of a sincere trust and belief in people. One of Wainwright’s leaders wondered what that meant. The CEO didn’t have a good answer, and that bothered him. What would Wainwright look like if it sincerely trusted and believed in its people?
The answer changed the company. A sincere trust and belief in people became one of its core values, and that value guided its actions. Quality improved. Safety improved. Customer satisfaction improved. Gross profit jumped 62 percent in just three years. And employees rewarded the company’s trust by generating more than one implemented improvement suggestion per employee per week. Most American companies struggle…
28Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedEngage Employees to Improve Performance
A study of 245 firefighters and their supervisors has shown that job engagement is a significant predictor of task performance and organizational citizenship behavior. The study, which is behind a firewall, is described by Bret L. Simmons on his blog.
The researchers measured job engagement through 18 questions organized by physical engagement, emotional engagement, and cognitive engagement. According to the article abstract, they found that “engagement, conceptualized as the investment of an individual’s complete self to a role, provides a more comprehensive explanation of relationships with performance relative to well-known concepts that reflect narrower aspects of the individual’s self.” The researchers were able to evaluate the impact of other factors including job involvement, job satisfaction, and intrinsic motivation on performance and behavior; they concluded these factors did not predict performance and behavior while engagement did.
According to Simmons, the researchers identified three antecedents of engagement: value congruence, perceived organizational support, and core self-evaluations. In other words, hire people who share and support your organization’s mission and values and who are self-sufficient and confident, and then provide development opportunities that align with your organizational values and your employees’ developmental needs.
In “Bottom-Line Value of Employee Engagement,” I wrote about a Gallup report that came to similar conclusions. Gallup defined a fully-engaged employee as emotionally attached to the unit and rationally loyal and found that “organizations that employ performance optimization management principles have outperformed their competitors by 26% in gross margin and 85% in sales growth.”
In “Employee Engagement and the Bottom Line,” I pointed to two specific…
20Jul2010 | Steve George | 1 comment | ContinuedWhat Drives You?
Daniel Pink wrote a book about what motivates us to do what we do called Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. I have the book in my hand but I haven’t read it yet, but this video has inspired me to dig into it.
It turns out that study after study has shown that money works if you want people to perform simple, rudimentary tasks, but if you want them to do something more complex, you need the three elements of true motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
To learn more, watch the video — and then join me in reading the book.
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6Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWorkforce Well-Being
The Baldrige Criteria ask a number of questions that get at the well-being of your workforce, including questions about employee satisfaction and health and the support you provide through services and benefits. Scientists at Gallup have been studying workforce well-being for more than 50 years. Two of these scientists wrote a book about it called Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements.
According to Gallup’s research, there are universal elements of well-being that differentiate thriving from struggling. They have grouped them in five categories:
- Career Well-Being: How you occupy your time or how much you like what you do every day.
- Social Well-Being: Having strong relationships and love in your life.
- Financial Well-Being: Effectively managing your economic life.
- Physical Well-Being: Having good health and enough energy to get things done.
- Community Well-Being: A sense of engagement with your community.
According to the book’s authors, when these factors are fully realized, people thrive.
An article on the Gallup Management Journal (click here) explains why this matters. Most of us believe that happy and healthy people get sick less often than miserable people. According to Gallup’s data, workers with the lowest well-being scores cost their companies $28,800 a year in lost productivity from sick days. In contrast, workers with the highest well-being scores cost their companies just $840 dollars.
That’s an astounding discrepancy! The data suggest that it is worth an organization’s time and money to improve their workforce well-being. That means paying attention to all five elements.
- Career Well-Being: Engage your employees. Gallup found a strong correlation between employee engagement and well-being.
- Social Well-Being:…
A Healthcare Innovator
The Henry Ford Health System built its first new hospital since 1915 a couple years ago in West Bloomfield, 30 minutes from downtown Detroit. According to William C. Taylor, the hospital “truly must be seen to be believed.” (“One Hospital’s Radical Prescription for Change,” HBR, June 2, 2010)
Here are a few things that made Taylor a believer:
- The hospital sits on a wooded 160-acre campus
- All 300 rooms are private and designed so that family members can stay overnight if they wish
- All patients go right to pre-assigned rooms when they arrive
- A concierge helps patients and families with errands
- A “tea sommelier” recommends different teas for different situations
- There’s a day spa and an indoor farmer’s market every Wednesday
- There’s a 90-seat demonstration kitchen to teach patients’ families and the community how to prepare better food
- A celebrity chef spent two years creating 3,000 healthy recipes for patients to choose from
- The atrium features more than 2,000 trees lining paths to shops that sell products that can improve health
There’s a Baldrige connection to this story: West Bloomfield’s new CEO is Gerard van Grinsven, who joined Henry Ford after a long career with two-time Baldrige Award winner Ritz-Carlton. Skeptics questioned the wisdom of hiring someone with no healthcare experience to run the new hospital. Van Grinsven thinks it was a smart move. “I had a fresh pair of eyes and no baggage when I arrived,” he said. “The real opportunity for reinvention is to rethink the role of a hospital. How do we position ourselves as a community center for…
3Jun2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedLayoffs and the Failure of Leadership
Susan Marvin wrote an insightful column that the StarTribune published in yesterday’s paper. Marvin and her three brothers run Marvin Windows, a privately-held window and door manufacturer in a small town in northern Minnesota. Their grandfather started the company in 1912.
Marvin begins by noting that, last year, her company cut the weekly hours of more than 1,000 workers from 40 to 32. Upon hearing the news, the workers cheered. They had feared layoffs during the housing downturn. The Marvin family decided that was not the best option. (“Do layoffs really help the bottom line?” StarTribune, April 2, 2010)
The Baldrige Criteria ask how your organization prepares for situations like this, although few leaders had expected a recession as deep and long as this has been. Such preparation includes determining the impact of decisions on all stakeholders, on the quality of your products and services, and on your culture.
Too many leaders ignore these factors and focus on just one: Laying people off cuts costs. When you grow, you add people. When revenues fall, you lay people off. From a financial standpoint, the logic makes perfect sense. As an added benefit, you can rid your organization of some of the “dead wood” that often accumulates over time.
The Marvins disagree with this approach. Susan Marvin points to a study by Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford University. According to Pfeffer’s research, layoffs lead to lower worker productivity, lower company profits, damaged employee morale, loss of institutional knowledge, and increased rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, mental-health…
5Apr2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedIs Your Job Ideal for You?
If you had to guess, how many of the people who work at your organization would say that their jobs are ideal for them?
Gallup asked 18,000 U.S. adults this question in January. Survey says: 70% think their jobs are ideal.
While that number is higher than I would have expected, the breakdown of the data provides fewer surprises. For those whose annual household income is less than $12,000, 57% said their jobs were ideal, a pretty high number for minimum wage jobs. At the top end of the scale—those making more than $120,000—77% say they have the ideal job. I guess the remaining 23% are just in it for the money.
Business owners topped the list of people who think their jobs are ideal (87%) with farming/forestry/fishing a close second. The bottom five are manager/executive at 68%; sales/retail at 64%; manufacturing/production and clerical/office at 61%; and service at 60%. In other words, pretty much anyone who works in a cubicle, manages people who work in cubicles, or stands for hours on a retail sales floor or a production line, which sounds like most of the workforce.
The older you are, the more likely you think your job is ideal. Seventy-eight percent of people 50-65 years old said so while only 52% of workers age 18 to 29 years agreed.
Education is a mixed bag. Those who had done postgraduate work ranked highest (77%), while those who completed some college were lowest at 63%—a full seven percent lower than those who had less than a…
19Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
