Combatting ignorance and complacency in the workforce

John Baldoni, leadership author and consultant, posted a brief but poignant piece today on Harvard Business' blog "Conversation Starter," entitled The Three Rules of Employee Engagement.  The post discusses how far too many employees are less engaged [and, thus, productive] due to a lack of understanding of how they, and their role, fits into the grander scheme of things.  Baldoni offers a few fairly straightforward - and, in my experience, effective - ways to combat this.   

Engaged employees are more productive - undoubtedly.  They're also more content in their jobs and likely to stay with the company longer, as well.  So, why do managers so often fail to take seemingly easy steps to ensure otherwise?  Perhaps it's lack of know how, an assumption that they already do understand where they fit in, or even just plain neglect. 

Regardless, Baldoni's prescription is simple and doesn't require much effort.  In fact, building his suggestions into any ongoing operating mechanisms - your planning cycles, company, team or staff meetings, performance discussions and periodic business reviews - is one way to ensure they're incorporated into your organization's practices.

Baldoni suggests three key tenets:

1. Explain the big picture
2. Communicate
3. Celebrate

"Explaining the big picture" is all about providing the context of the employee's role as it pertains to what the group, function or company is trying to achieve overall.  Without it, individuals are more likely to wander off on tangents, focus on lower priorities and, above all, not share the same sense of urgency that hopefully senior leaders have.  Steve Bennett, former CEO of Intuit, called this "line of sight" and it was all about making certain that each individual understood from the company strategy all the way down to their unique role and the connections linking them. 

In the second principle - communicate - it can't be emphasized enough that repetition is a key ingredient to its successful application.  It often takes several times for key messages to truly become ingrained in an organization's DNA.  Using regularly scheduled company or team meetings to review strategy, operating plans and priorities helps reinforce the linkage created in step 1.  Of course, communication is most effective when it's two-way.  And, providing forums for dialogue - particularly where employees can discuss or debate performance and priorities - is not only highly empowering but also fairly exciting to watch.  For this reason, I tend to favor monthly operating or business reviews where each function or group delves into the the performance of the prior period, the "whys" behind it, and how priorities for coming period may require fine tuning.  These meetings are most effective when all participate.  When people are able to partake in the conversation, they're more invested in what's behind it.

The final area is that of celebrating.  Celebrating the successes - of any size - is not something that always comes easy to type A driver personalities.  Yet, very few people really enjoy environments where little to no positive feedback is received for extended periods of time.  In tougher situations, such as startups or revitalization efforts, it's even more critical as team members need to feel they're making progress or hope can dwindle and become a self-fulfilling process.

Ironically, I was discussing the latter point with a company I advise earlier this evening as they struggle to meet the first quarter's goals.  However, in delving beneath the numbers, some fairly positive [and, new] signs emerged that breathed a bit more optimism into the forthcoming period.  We agreed it was important to share these insights with the larger team in the upcoming business review for exactly that reason.

There's no rocket science behind John Baldoni's ideas here.  But, then again, that's somewhat the premise behind this blog to begin with - applying simple, basic principles to better manage your business. 

And...these work.

 

Comments

[Carolyn Schrader]

I fully agree with John Baldoni's key components. People are social creatures and want to know what is the expected end result. That end result may be a short term objective to get through an immediate situation or it may be a larger vision/objective. But it must be quantifiable in some fashion - more revenue, less expense, happier customers, whatever. We have created a business culture that expects measurement.

I would expand Baldoni's tenets to include honesty - managers of all levels should know the true picture. It may be wordsmithed and it doesn't need to be full of all details (good and bad) but clear honesty allows the employees to think creatively for problem solving and not feel betrayed if things turn out to be significantly different later. Think of all the scandals in the news - honesty helps people get through misdeeds and errors of judgment.

In a postive environment, honesty allows employees the freedom to know they can take a level of risk corresponding to that company's tolerance and feel they "belong" to a bettter/greater group which will achieve more that that being a sole performer.