When looking to improve job satisfaction, we want to start from the inside sphere and work our way out… start with a challenging job and a healthy relationship with a person’s direct manager.
From first to last, below are the areas needed to create a job that’s fulfilling:
Look for opportunities to make a job more than a job:
In an engagement survey, below are a few of the questions they’d be asked around the trust and effectiveness of managers:
To me, leadership has two main components… first, is how we think
Great leaders take blame for mistakes, give away credit when there’s success, and set an example:
I think Dale Carnegie does a great job of nailing the seven things a leader does…
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.
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:
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:
