Happy Employees Archives

Employee Engagement: Trust with Co-Workers

Here are a couple of questions around coworker trust found on an engagement survey:

To help the leadership team understand how each of us are “wired”, we’ve all taken a personality assessment and created a cheat sheet which identifies the core ways we want to work with one another.

To create an environment of trust, as leaders, we need to let our team members know it’s O.K. to make mistakes. To create trust, we need to know each other as people. To do this, there should be a corporate calendar with scheduled business and social events.

Employee Engagement: Teamwork

When assessing engagement related to teamwork, below are a couple of questions found on a employee engagement survey:

For employees, there should be clear, objective goals. At Intertech, for performance management, we use Dale Carnegie Key Result Areas (KRAs) but any method that’s forward facing and objective works.

What do great managers have in common? They focus on the employee’s strengths:

Here are a couple of my favorite teamwork quotes:

Engagement starts with hiring.

Finally, look for ways to connect your team with technology. Below are a few favorites:

Employee Engagement: Alignment with Goals

Below are a couple of questions that an employee would be asked about how they fit in the big picture:

The biggest way a leader misses the mark is tying the individual into the overall mission and goals for the organization’s success.

For mission and goals, as a leader, if we can’t explain how an employee fits into the big picture, we can’t expect them to!

Ditto on values… if we can’t succinctly say our values, we can’t our people to!

If you don’t have values firmly defined, Google “Jim Collins Martian Exercise” and use that as a plan to define your organization’s values.

For values to work, they need to be integrated into the fabric of the firm. Here are a few ideas we implement at Intertech to weave values into our day-to-day operations:

How do you get everyone on the same page with a goal for the company? Consider a theme! A theme is something company-wide. It could be around hiring, creating content, or whatever is needed to move the organization forward. Below are some thoughts on creating a theme:

Increasing Employee Engagement

Last month, I delivered a conference keynote. My talk was on engagement. For the 400+ attendees, I started by sharing what engagement means and finished with the eight areas of engagement and shared specific, actionable ideas to increase engagement.

Employee engagement results in a few major things… employees who advocate and promote your organization, who do more than the job requires, and who stay.

When you see the “Best” or “Great” places to work lists in magazines or newspapers, they are based on engagement. Engagement surveys are measured by:

For an engaging job, this is what employees look for:

For a manager that drives high engagement, they don’t focus on weakness:

Engagement results in more productivity, profit, safety and less absenteeism:

Engagement is not gimmicks or expensive:

Getting Curious Gets Results

Curiosity might kill the cat, as the old saying goes, but it might just bring your business back to life. This month’s edition of Harvard Business Review focuses its spotlight on “The Business Case for Curiosity.” Harvard business professor Francesca Gino provides many thought-provoking ideas and practical ideas in her cover article. She also helped me realize how pivotal curiosity has been to the growth and success of Intertech, even though we do not expressly call it that.

“When we are curious, we view tough situations more creatively and have less defensive reactions to stress,” she notes. I’ve seen this very dynamic in meetings with senior leaders. We all ask a lot of questions and challenge each other to think deeper. Sometimes the best ideas emerge because one leader was particularly curious about a particular issue and kept pushing back with more questions.

Knowing that we all have a shared investment in the company’s success makes it easier to stay curious and not get defensive. This is an important part of our company culture too, which is why we host an annual Town Hall for employees to talk and share their ideas, concerns and recommendations (more about that below).

But, back to Professor Gino’s idea in brief: “Leaders say they value employees who question or explore things but research shows that they largely suppress curiosity, out of fear that it will increase risk and undermine efficiency. . . Curiosity improves engagement and collaboration. Curious people make better choices, improve their company’s performance, and help their company adapt to uncertain market conditions and external pressures. . . Leaders should encourage curiosity in themselves and others by making small changes to the design of their organization and the ways they manage their employees.”

She then lays out five ways leaders can bolster curiosity at work:

Hire for curiosity. Google asks applicants: “Have you ever found yourself unable to stop learning something you’ve never encountered before? Why? What kept you persistent?” Finding people who keep learning out of personal interest is a good sign that they’re innately curious. A question I ask in interviews is “What is the last book you read for professional development?” To ensure they’ve read what they say they’ve said, I follow this question with “What is the biggest thing you learned from that book?”
Model inquisitiveness. From our leadership to sales teams, we agree upon and read a book per quarter. Then we share insights we can apply to our firm. I read The Economist and several other periodicals, two daily papers, multiple economic and business forecasting newsletters, and at any given time, a couple of books. I also have always believed it’s important to listen more than I speak as a leader. In my book, The 100: Building Blocks for Business Leadership, I devote chapter 84 to the importance of listening to employees and to asking key questions. Listening to customers also is key, particularly in the early stages of a new project when we are working to understand expectations. Last, I look for ways to double down on learning and turn time commuting or running the kids around into learning with Audible and Blinklist.
Emphasize learning goals. This one really hit home with me. Every Intertech team member has an annual learning goal. In an industry like software, staying ahead of the curve is essential. Notes Professor Gino, “Leaders can help employees adopt a learning mindset by communicating the importance of learning and by rewarding people not only for their performance but for the learning needed to get there.”
Let employees explore and broaden their interests. I’ll admit that in the press of daily business, this can be hard. Employees with proven expertise are extremely valuable. But we know the best employees are most excited about learning new skills and staying ahead of the pack. Every month, we have a company-wide “Second Friday BBQ” lunch (being honest, the BBQ turns into subs or pizza when the snow starts flying in Minnesota). On the Second Friday BBQ, one or more team members deliver a chalk talk on an emerging technology.
Have “Why?” “What If. . .” and “How might we. . .?” days. As I referred to earlier, our annual Town Hall meeting is dedicated to just such questions. Employees take a half-day off from their regular client projects to gather in small groups to explore how we do things and how we can do things differently or better. This feedback is provided to senior managers anonymously so employees feel completely free to speak their minds and ask tough questions. It’s one of the most valuable management tools we have and employees consistently tell us they appreciate the chance to share in this way. In the past, we’ve also used a concept we call “FedEx Day” where employees have 24 hours to work on whatever they choose then present their results to the company.

Staying curious might be difficult when you’ve been running a business for a long time, but resist the trap of thinking you know it all. No matter what your industry, it’s no doubt changing at the speed of light. Curiosity is the only way to keep growing your business and your mind!