All Posts Tagged With: "workforce engagement"
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…
28Jul2010 | 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…
10 Critical Questions: Results
The Baldrige model focuses on results: You don’t transform an organization without a very good reason, and for those organizations that transform themselves through Baldrige, the reason is because it delivers results. Check out some of the results achieved by Baldrige Award recipients in the following areas:
Better yet, read Category 7 in the award application summary of any winner you choose (click here) and you will find impressive results across all six of the areas measured.
The Results Category is the only Category in the Baldrige Criteria that examines your organization’s performance and improvement—but this one Category is worth 45% of the possible points when scoring a Baldrige application because the Baldrige model focuses on results. The best way to evaluate your results is through an assessment using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here. If you cannot do a full assessment but want insight into how to improve your results, here are 10 critical questions to ask and answer:
What are your current levels and trends in key measures of:
- Product performance OR student learning and improvement in student learning OR health care outcomes, health care process results, patient safety, and patients’ functional status?
- Customer/student/patient and stakeholder satisfaction, dissatisfaction, relationship building, and engagement?
- Financial performance?
- Market or marketplace performance?
- Workforce engagement and satisfaction?
- Workforce and leader development?
- The operational performance of your work systems and key work processes?
- Regulatory and legal compliance and ethical behavior?
- For each of these measures,…
