GreatWork Blog

Building better workplaces through compliance, culture, connection

Strong organizations require a strong organizational culture, which helps employees understand expectations, feel a sense of pride and focus on what is good and right. A mission or values statement, a creed or a set of beliefs distinguishes a business from other firms and identifies its scope of operations in product and market terms. The organization’s mission is fundamental to establishing priorities and making strategic decisions.

Recently an HR Manager asked me for advice on how to implement a successful cross-training program for team leads across multiple departments.

Having a bad manager can make a great job terrible. The problem is that some managers were never taught the right way to manage people.

If you’re looking to get a really quick pulse on your culture and employee engagement, here is the one statement you should ask employees to rate their agreement with: “It would take a lot for me to leave this organization.”

Leading your organization in a competitive environment requires innovation and navigating transition effectively. Some factors you can control — or at least significantly influence — while others you can’t. Involving employees early in preparing for and implementing changes helps prevent failure and regret.

Regardless of whether I’m training, coaching or consulting, I regularly hear the same complaint about Millennials in the workforce: They’re so entitled.

Even very smart people assume that employees are either motivated or not, that no one can change the way they were born and bred. But that’s not true. Leaders listen carefully and probe. They are open to suggestions and build the confidence of others. They keep us informed and challenge us with goals and feedback. They praise our efforts and celebrate our meaningful achievements. They focus on our strengths and let us do what we do best every day.

Decade after decade when supervisors were polled and asked to rank ten dimensions of work in terms of their importance to employees, they guessed wrong. It wasn’t “Good wages,” “Promotion and growth” and “Good working conditions” that employees put at the top. Instead the number one ranked dimension was “Full appreciation for work done,” followed by “Feeling like I’m making a difference.”

Would you like to build a spectacular team? One great place to start is to uncover positive memories of your potential team members.

For a guy who is sometimes a “no-nonsense” manager, this entire concept is a little woo-woo. But, in the “no-nonsense” world of work we are always looking for an edge, a way to make our workplaces more effective. 

If you are like most, you are especially conscious of weaknesses in yourself and others. It’s built in our wiring, our insecurity. But we get much further by focusing on strengths. 

What? How can my awesomeness be a problem? My awesomeness is awesome. It is the other guy’s lack of awesomeness that is the problem.

Moving employees to higher levels of engagement is usually a gradual process. Despite what themes from Hollywood movies suggest, movement into maturity and engagement does not happen in an hour and three-quarters (…with all of us living happily ever after). Movement along the engagement continuum takes time and investment.

There is a bounty of information on the definition of employee engagement and what it looks like in the general sense, but what does it really look like? Through my very own eyeballs, what will I see? When I work with employers on employee engagement, I start with three basic statements. I ask them to write down their responses alone. No talking. And I begin observing them.

We all have them. Weaknesses, that is. Things we just are not good at. Skillful managers put themselves and their employees in positions that maximize our strength zone so that these weaknesses become irrelevant—they just don’t matter anymore. 

Employee relations has a reputation for being a catch all for anything HR related. I agree there is a lot that is included under the umbrella of employee relations, but I also believe it’s really only about three VERY IMPORTANT things: relationships, meaningful work and strengths.

Now that certain industries are seeing some recovery from the economic downturn, from a human resource perspective there is one big mistake that is proving to be a key differentiating factor between a successful recovery and continued struggle. 

According to research conducted by the Families and Work Institute (FWI), providing workplace flexibility improves business results.  Workplace flexibility (or workflex as they often call it) matters to all employees to some degree. 

We are hard wired to focus on threats, things that might put us in danger and things that are wrong.  Unfortunately, that wiring does us a disservice is some situations because it pulls away our focus from what’s right.  

When struggling big box retailer Best Buy followed in the footsteps of Yahoo! Inc. by altering its telecommuting policies for employees, some undoubtedly concluded that there would soon be a flood of companies doing the same. However, a new survey indicates that Best Buy may be in the minority, with the overwhelming percentage of companies planning to maintain their telecommuting policies.

According to a recent report from Aon Hewitt, there are three current drivers of employee engagement in the United States. How would your employees rate your organization in these areas? 

I grew up in a house in San Francisco where golf seemed like the most important activity in the world. My father, a policeman, was on the swing shift and did not spend a lot of time with my brother and me, but when he did, we talked, practiced and played golf. For 30 years, my father played every Friday with the same foursome (his team). We practiced putting in the living room. When my brother reached high school, he joined the golf team and became “first man.” He even developed a booklet about putting with photos in it.

In the past year, I’ve worked with numerous organizations on employee engagement. I’ve sifted through and analyzed a lot of data, had some difficult conversations, celebrated with employers, and stayed up late at night researching. What have I found out?

What makes employees want to do their best? Right at the top of motivators is positive reinforcement, i.e., people who thoughtfully listen to our ideas, recognize our strengths and reward our efforts with appreciation. There are plenty of managers and executives with weak people skills who think beautiful buildings, snazzy perks and fat paychecks will bring out the best in people. They don’t.

Employee engagement sometimes has a reputation of being something soft and fluffy that HR is buzzing about. It’s fun to talk about, but your executive team wants to know what’s the impact on the bottom line? Try throwing some of these compelling stats out at your next meeting. 

In your workplace, have you heard the phrase “Employee Engagement” and the word “Kaizen”? It is true that there are various definitions of “Employee Engagement” in each different organization. And “Kaizen” is originally a Japanese word that means continuous (quality) improvement.

According to most research, one of the key drivers of employee engagement is the “opportunity to do what I do best everyday.”

If your employees think there is any chance they will be identified based on their responses or comments in an engagement survey, the validity of the survey immediately comes into question.  Although this factor can be somewhat beyond your control, there are steps you can take to build confidence and anonymity.

As recent graduates pour into a workplace brimming with older employees, cross-generational dynamics are rife with age stereotypes. But are these stereotypes scientifically valid? A new study by the international training and consulting firm AchieveGlobal found they are not.