What Your Employees Want You to Know (But You Might Be Afraid to Ask)
This is a challenge for every company owner and manager. You have tremendous plans for growth and expect a lot of your employees. But do you know if the company is meeting your best employees’ expectations? Are you providing the type of environment that supports high productivity and high quality? Do you really want to know?
If you do, consider creating a Company Performance Review to find out what your company culture really is. Find out how employees feel about their environment and morale at your company. The Company Performance Review asks employees if they see certain behaviors occurring at your company – behaviors that could kill a company over time if left unchecked. It will help you determine if there are ethical issues you need to be concerned about in your company.
This review must be completed anonymously, or employees won’t be comfortable answering honestly. The object is to make all employees suddenly more aware that actions that are sometimes common in companies can do real and lasting damage. It takes effort to increase the recognition of ethical issues to make it easier to begin setting standards.
For instance, here are some questions you might consider asking employees – but only if you are ready to deal with the answers in the whole culture (don’t kill the messenger).
Do employees?
Give a full days work for a full days pay
Accept gifts or favors from suppliers
Falsify time sheets or other reports
Gossip about other employees
Do other work on company time or with company equipment
Do managers or supervisors?
Discriminate by gender or race
Allow unsafe or unhealthy work conditions
Discourage criticism
Forget or fail to give promised performance reviews or salary increases
Have unfair work performance expectations
Does top management?
Ignore long-term problems
Live up to our mission statement
Provide rewards such as promotions on a basis other than competence
Mismanage company funds
Really care about employees
When you get the answers tabulated consider these thoughts:
Are there ethical issues you uncovered with this survey that surprised and concerned you?
Are you setting the right example for employees?
Are you satisfied that the standards of behavior you have set are high enough?
Are there items that should be added to this list that are unique to your company or industry?
Do you have a policy and procedures manual or employee handbook that sets standards on these issues?
Should some of these behaviors be cause for termination of employment?
Honest feedback can be hard to hear. I suggest you work with an industrial psychologist or other professional to help you hear the positive message in the survey results and formulate a plan of action. The real reward will come later when you administer the survey a second time and the results have changed for the better.
About The Author
Jan B. King is the former President & CEO of Merritt Publishing, a top 50 woman-owned and run business in Los Angeles and the author of Business Plans to Game Plans: A Practical System for Turning Strategies into Action (John Wiley & Sons, 2004). She has helped hundreds of businesses with her book and her ebooks, The Do-It-Yourself Business Plan Workbook, and The Do-It-Yourself Game Plan Workbook. See www.janbking.com for more information.
You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print, free of charge, as long as the byline is included. A courtesy copy of your publication would be appreciated.
janbking0191@sbcglobal.net
Practical Tips to Motivating Employees
Some employees are true self-starters and seem to motivate themselves to excel. But even with your highest flyers, there could be times where he or she hits a funk and needs some positive motivation. Look to these tips to help you through the trial:
Make sure the goal is crystal clear – The first step in motivating an employee is ensuring he very clearly understands the goal and when it needs to be met. If goals aren’t clear or if you can’t articulate the goal yourself, spend time getting clarity with both yourself and the employee.
Put them on the same side of the table as you – Design your rewards (financial, prestige, etc.) around attainment of the goal and get them working with you as opposed to against you. Putting some tangible rewards around goal attainment will allow the employees to see the fruits of their labor.
Don’t be afraid to expose poor performance – If progress isn’t being made against the goal, be very explicit and deliberate about showing objective performance measures and progress against the measure. Objectivity is very important here; if you are concerned about being objective, use a trusted colleague or HR representative to cross-check you.
Clearly articulate the consequences of continued poor performance – Ensure the employee knows what can happen if performance doesn’t improve. It could be loss of financial reward, a lower job title, or in extreme cases, termination. Again, be objective and use a trusted colleague or HR rep if necessary.
Follow through – Don’t make idle threats or statements that the employee knows you won’t follow through on. If you set a goal to be achieved by a certain date and both your reward and consequence are clear; be prepared to follow through on either the reward or consequence.
Lonnie Pacelli has over 20 years’ experience with Accenture and Microsoft and is currently president of Leading on the Edge
Managing The E-mail Monster
In common with many people today I conduct an increasing percentage of my business remotely, coming into contact with different groups of people only when the event occurs that has been the object of an email correspondence.
The title of these events is normally “How To Create A Sustained Performance Improvement” and during the introduction I explore some of the problems that are currently blocking performance our performance at work.
Almost invariably the answer to the opening question “What prevents you from performing at work?” is “E-mail”, and the answer is normally sung out as one voice.
The groups all agree on the problem and it is very difficult sometimes to bring them back to the purpose of the current event when they become embroiled in an orgy of horror stories about the way that E-mail is ruining their lives.
One day I took a step back and decided that if this was such an overwhelming concern it deserved the time it would take to examine its nature to see if we could effect a cure.
The first group that I listened to were all from the same department in the same organisation but working in different locations.
Their stated problem was that nobody wanted to be seen to get in the way of an idea so every E-mail that was generated was copied to everyone in the department by everybody else and that every body felt that they had to be seen to be making a contribution so they had to make a comment on every E-mail they received.
Individuals would routinely receive the same E-mail many times and each time felt that they had to comment on the comments that had been made since their last comment.
I asked the group how they would solve the problem and one wag suggested that each individual should be made to pay for every email that they forwarded on the basis that this would focus their minds and get rid of what was unnecessary.
The group could not work out how to make that happen practically but they explored the idea of personal responsibility and realised that in order to achieve the required focus payment wasn’t really necessary, but that accountability was.
They left that day with a plan to place before their IT manager, to log every E-mail that was forwarded internally.
This log was converted into a bar chart and a copy placed on each notice board so that every individual could see exactly the amount that they were personally contributing to the problem, or the solution.
A very simple strategy to solve what I had thought was a universal problem, except that this was only one facet of the nature of the E-mail monster.
I listened to other groups complain in the same way about the affect that emails were having on their ability to work and noticed a different problem and that was SPAM.
When given the space to pursue this E-mail conversation it soon became apparent that there was another phenomenon that affected a different group of users.
They were not being deluged with E-mail forwarded by their colleagues but were having their ability to do any real work compromised by the number of apparently unsolicited emails they received from external sources.
This was a different problem that clearly required a different solution.
While listening to these different conversations it soon became apparent that the longer the conversations were allowed to go unchecked the more they started to resemble conversations overheard in a playground about who had the biggest brother or who had found the most conkers on the way back from school the previous night.
Each story told was preceded by a casual estimate of the number of E-mails the individual received each day that always carefully outbid the previous story teller before embarking on the tale of what a monumental task it was to delete all of these E-mails.
I slowly came to realise that the number of E-mail and the size of the problem was being worn as a badge by the complainant, being used in a backhanded way to complain about how popular/important they were.
Having made this discovery it was easy to go to the next logical step which was to realise that in order to feel more important individuals were actually encouraging their own bombardment by signing up for regular mailings on the premise that they may be useful and then in fact deleting them as soon as they arrived.
In this way individuals were building for themselves a comfortable feeling of their own importance that was reinforced every day by their in-trays which contained hundreds of E-mails that were laboriously deleted every time, but were never unsubscribed.
This is my challenge, and it will hurt.
Count the E-mails in your inbox in the morning.
Count the number that you delete without a thought.
What if instead of the delete button you clicked on unsubscribe?
It will hurt to even think of this because you are ripping away your safety blanket that gives you daily reassurance that people keep sending you emails because you are important or popular,
We can reclaim our day from the E-mail monster that we have created for ourselves by hitting unsubscribe.
It is our choice?
This morning I received fourty four E-mails in my in tray (I have exaggerated the number to make me sound important) and without thinking I deleted thirty nine of them.
Realising what I had done I went to the deleted mails file where I was able to unsubscribe from five of them and put twelve into the junk mail file.
The first one or two “unsubscribes” felt awful because these were people whose mail I would no longer be receiving, I had cut myself off, but as I went on it started to feel so good, the feeling that these E-mail monsters would no longer be in charge of my day.
I got so carried away that I continued through my deleted mail file for another 30 minutes unsubscribing and junking most of what I found.
This was probably one of the most effective half hours of my year.
Peter A Hunter
www.breakingthemould.co.uk
If you have ever experienced or learnt something which you then knew was instinctively right – you will never have forgotten it.
Peter Hunter learnt something years ago which, regrettably, most of us have still yet to learn.
When we do – once we have understood the simplicity of his book ‘Breaking the Mould’ – it will transform our lives forever!
Vic Baxter – Business Workout.
Managing Things and Leading People
“Too many managers treat “their people” as assets with skin wrapped around them.”
High-performing teams and organizations balance the discipline of systems, processes, and technology management on a base of effective people leadership. Here are some key of the key distinctions between the two:
The Management-Leadership Balance
Management:
Systems, process, and technology
Goals, standards, and measurements
Control
Strategic Planning
A way of doing
Directing
Responding and reacting
Continuous Improvement of what is
Leadership:
People – context and culture
Preferred future, principles, and purpose
Commitment
Strategic opportunism
A way of being
Serving
Initiating and originating
Innovative breakthroughs to what could be
Both management and leadership skills are needed at the organizational, team, and personal levels. It’s not a case of either/or, but and/also. Futurist, Joel Barker provides another helpful distinction between the two roles; “managers manage within paradigms, leaders lead between paradigms”. Both are needed. Trying to run an organization with only leadership or management is like trying to cut a page with half a pair of scissors. Leadership and management are a matched set; are both needed to be effective.
Systems and processes (management) for example, are critical to success. You and your organization can be using the latest technologies and be highly focused on customers and those serving them (leadership), but if the methods and approaches you’re using to structure and organize your work is weak, your performance will suffer badly. People in your organization can be “empowered”, energized, and enlightened; but if your systems, processes, and technologies don’t enable them to perform well, they won’t. Developing the discipline and using the most effective tools and techniques of personal and organization systems and processes is a critical element of high performance.
But as the sweeping movement to teams, “empowerment”, and involvement intensifies, many more daily management tasks are moving to the front lines where they belong. So leadership becomes even more critical. Unfortunately, many people in so-called leadership positions aren’t leaders. They’re managers, bureaucrats, technocrats, bosses, administrators, department heads, and the like; but they aren’t leaders. On the other hand, some people in individual contributor roles are powerful leaders. Leadership is an action, not a position.
A leader doesn’t just react and respond, but rather takes the initiative and generates action. A leader doesn’t say “something should be done”, but ensures something is done. An effective leader is a “people person”. Effective leaders connect, stay in contact with, and are highly visible to everyone on their team and in their organization. Leaders have developed the skills of supercharging logic, data, and analysis with emotion, pride, and the will to win. Their passion and enthusiasm for the team or organization’s vision and purpose is highly contagious. They fire the imaginations, develop the capabilities, and build the confidence of people to “go for it”. Leaders help people believe the impossible is possible, which makes it highly probable.
Do you like to be managed or led? You’re not alone. Very few people want to work for a manager. Most of us would much rather be led by a leader. To manage is to control, handle, or manipulate. To lead is to guide, influence, or persuade. You manage things — systems, processes, and technology. You lead people. The roots of the rampant morale, energy, and performance problems found in many organizations are Technomanagers who treat people as “human resources” to be managed. If you want to manage someone, manage yourself. Once you master that, you’ll be a much more effective leader of others.
Jim Clemmer is a bestselling author and internationally acclaimed keynote speaker, workshop/retreat leader, and management team developer on leadership, change, customer focus, culture, teams, and personal growth. During the last 25 years he has delivered over two thousand customized keynote presentations, workshops, and retreats. Jim’s five international bestselling books include The VIP Strategy, Firing on All Cylinders, Pathways to Performance, Growing the Distance, and The Leader’s Digest. His web site is http://www.clemmer.net/articles.