All Posts Tagged With: "workforce engagement"
Know Your Employees
The numbers tell you that Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital (AGSH) in Downers Grove, Illinois, is a good place to work: associate, physician, and volunteer satisfaction were all near 100% in 2009. One of its core competencies is to “build loyal relationships,” which it does by using systematic processes to identify and meet workforce requirements.
A recipient of the 2010 Baldrige Award, AGSH has more than 2,700 associates (employees), nearly a thousand physicians, and 500 volunteers. In its award application summary, available here, AGSH describes the Workforce Satisfaction & Engagement Process that it uses to determine what matters most to its employees, physicians, and volunteers. As the diagram shows, regression analysis determines the most important factors, which are then validated through rounding and two-way communication.
Organizations can only achieve and sustain high levels of employee satisfaction and engagement through (a) profound knowledge of the factors that produce satisfaction and engagement and (b) an organization-wide commitment to improving performance on those factors. Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital’s results prove that its knowledge and commitment are world-class.
To read more about employee satisfaction and engagement, click on these articles:
- Understanding Employee Requirements
- A Culture That Values Employees
- How Does Your Workplace Measure Up?
- Employee Engagement Boosts Organizational Performance
- MEDRAD: Win with Your…
Fear in Workplace a Barrier to Success
Gallup recently identified five “internally built and locally maintained” barriers to an organization’s effectiveness: fear, information flow, short-term thinking, misalignment, and money.
Fear is a natural byproduct of many organizations’ cultures. It’s not necessarily the “cowering in the corner” type of fear (although I once worked for a company that inspired cowering) as much as the type of fear that breeds timidity, defensiveness, and blame. Does your organization produce fearful or trusting employees?
The chart was adapted from Driving Fear Out of the Workplace by Kathleen Ryan and Daniel Oestreich, who offer seven strategies for replacing fear and mistrust with energy and innovation:
- Acknowledge the presence of fear. Just talking about it in small groups and staff meetings is a start.
- Pay attention to interpersonal conduct. Identify abrasive or abusive conduct and develop a shared picture of positive relations.
- Value criticism: Reward the messenger. Promote a mindset that problems are prized possessions because they suggest opportunities for improvement.
- Reduce ambiguous behavior. Reduce the amount of incomplete, inaccurate, or confusing communications.
- Discuss the undiscussables. Uncover the issues people aren’t talking about and find ways to discuss them.
- Collaborate on decisions. Practice involving more people in making decisions.
- Challenge worst-case thinking. Help free people from the traps of their negative assumptions.
I’ve written before about the late quality guru W. Edwards Deming’s…
21Feb2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedKeys to Successful Process Improvement
The Baldrige model is all about process improvement. The first five categories in the Baldrige Criteria focus on an organization’s key processes in leadership, strategic planning, customer relationships, measurement, and your workforce, and the sixth category asks how you design, manage, and improve these processes.
Baldrige Award winners achieve what many organizations attempt, which is to realize the benefits of process improvement in world-class results. Why do they succeed where others fail? Brad Power attempts to answer that question in “What the C-Suite Needs to Do for Process Improvement?” (HBR, December 15, 2010) He draws on 30 years of experience as a consultant to identify three reasons that process improvement initiatives fail:
- Organizations optimize processes within functions and departments rather than across them. Your most important processes involve multiple functions and departments.
- Frontline workers can’t properly contribute to company goals when they lack information about how to have an impact on them. Organizations that integrate Baldrige use strategic planning and performance measurement systems, as well as frequent communication, to show workers what the organization’s goals are and how everyone contributes to reaching them.
- Top managers can’t realize the substantial benefits of process improvements if they, rather than workers, identify what needs to change. The people…
Close 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 | ContinuedThe 3 P’s: Starting Points for Integrating Baldrige
Where do you start? You want to make your organization more competitive, better able to meet customer needs, less inclined to mistakes, but you’ve been doing things the same way for years and you’re not sure where to begin.
When I get this question, I suggest starting with one or more of the 3 P’s: processes, people, or planning.
Start with Processes. The Baldrige model is a process model because the work of an organization is done through processes. Organizations that haven’t taken a formal approach to process management usually spend way too much time firefighting because their processes are out of control, or they blame people when their processes fail. Neither is a prescription for long-term success.
You can develop a process orientation by first identifying your key work processes, which Baldrige defines as your most important internal value creation processes. If you’re not sure where to start, look at what products and/or services you provide to your customers and figure out the internal steps that design, produce, and deliver those products and services. Then consider the support processes that make these customer-driven processes possible, such as your key processes in sales, marketing, finance, human resources, IT, etc. Once you’ve identified your value…
12Oct2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBest Practice People Management
Last year, Deloitte, The Manufacturing Institute, and Oracle surveyed U.S. manufacturers about their people management practices, which included asking them to identify the key drivers of their future business success. The most profitable of the largest 142 companies in the survey shared three best practices that differentiated them from the least profitable companies:
- They defined a clear and explicit people strategy linked to their business strategy.
- They conducted formal succession planning across the workforce.
- They linked employee pay directly with the productivity of the company or the manufacturing plant.
(from “People Management Practices and Profitability in Manufacturing” by Richard Kleinert, Emily Stover DeRocco, Atanu Chaudhuri, and Robert Maciejewski, IndustryWeek, October 11, 2010)
The Baldrige Criteria address all three best practices with questions about:
- Human resource plans that support your strategic objectives and action plans. The IndustryWeek article notes that, “In many organizations, the HR function does not participate in the strategy development process nor does it have complete visibility into corporate or business unit strategies.” That won’t fly at a Baldrige organization.
- Managing effective career progression for the entire workforce. Organizations that integrate Baldrige develop what the articles calls “a long-term talent management strategy” that looks “beyond the C-suite to prioritize succession of all critical positions based on specific…
Employee 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…
26Aug2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
