We Maintain Our Machines Better than we Maintain Our People
Posted on 11. Jan, 2010 by Phil Gerbyshak in employee engagement
What follows is a guest post from Paul Herr, author of Primal Management, a must-read book for managers of any experience level.
According to Gallup, only 29% of employees in the U.S. care about their work. If this were a college exam, 29% would equate to an “F.” I can therefore state with some confidence that modern “best practices” earn failing grades in “Employee Motivation 101.”
To better understand the roots of the disengagement epidemic, let’s compare how companies treat their manufacturing equipment to how they treat their employees—their human capital. The difference is enlightening.
Imagine that we are standing in a factory manager’s office. Now let’s ask the manager a basic question, “Is your machinery operating at its rated capacity or is it malfunctioning?” The manager would calmly turn to his computer, pull up a few graphs, and answer confidently, “Everything is functioning according to specifications.”
Now let’s ask the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of a service business the same question, “How Is your human-capital functioning?” The startled COO would answer, “Huh?” The sad fact is, we treat our manufacturing equipment far better than we treat our employees. According to Gallup, the financial fallout from this oversight is measured in legions of disengaged employees and in trillions of dollars of lost productivity.
Perfect Storm of Management
Posted on 07. Sep, 2009 by Phil Gerbyshak in employee engagement
A recent article shares something most managers know as fact: The employee – employer relationship has changed. They offer 3 reasons why the relationship has changed:
- The psychological contract has been broken.
- There’s increased competition.
- Employees and employers aren’t engaged.
So what? Why do you care if the relationship has changed? LOTS of reasons, but I’ll give you 2 of the most important:
Lower performance of existing employees– If nobody is engaged, performance can’t be at the highest levels and thus productivity will decrease and nobody will be at their absolute best. The lower the performance, the less money the company makes, which in turn means employees will be paid a smaller percentage of profits (if there are any profits to share)
Higher turnover – All of this naturally leads to higher turnover, as employees search for places they can be valued and fully utilized, and as employers search for those who are fully engaged.
Sounds like a perfect storm of employee – employer disengagement, where nobody wins…not the company, not the employee, not the shareholders, nobody.
Just because employee – employer relationship has changed, I”m not going to stop trying to engage my team, and I encourage you to work towards overcoming these problems. Knowing there’s a problem is half the battle; it’s up to you to find ways to overcome these challenges.
Perfect storm photo credit to Jeff McNeill
Show Up Engaged
Posted on 15. Jun, 2009 by Phil Gerbyshak in employee engagement
While I frequently slant the articles on Slacker Manager towards new managers, I think this is one that even the most experienced of managers need to read and understand. Wally Bock inked One thing you can do to supervise better and offered a great tip:
Show Up (Often)
Wally shares 3 reasons showing up often works:
- No longer an event when you do show up, so folks will be more likely to shoot you straight
- Reducing stress by decreasing the chance folks will be surprised when you show up
- Creating opportunities for conversation
I’d like to share a few more reasons showing up works, and offer you a slight twist on Wally’s ideas.
Show Up Engaged
Showing up is good, but showing up engaged is better. Be there to make a difference and really BE THERE.
3 ways to show up engaged
Pay Attention – Put your iPhone away. Look your folks in the eyes. Smile at them. Nod when appropriate.
Ask Questions – If you don’t understand what your team has been doing, ask questions to gain a better understanding of what they’re saying. Ask questions about them, about their family, about what’s important to them.
Share Your Understanding – If your team has insights into things you’ve been working on, share what you know when you can, and explain how their ideas work into the big picture.
How can you show up engaged with YOUR team?
More on Employee Engagement Survey
Posted on 15. Apr, 2009 by Phil Gerbyshak in employee engagement
One of the amazing readers of Slacker Manager wanted to do a little more digging on the causes and stats behind employee engagement increasing. Rather than just leave a long comment, Rick Hamrick wrote a wonderful follow-up article for you to learn more about this VERY important topic. Thanks Rick!
Here is what I discovered in digging a little deeper: Modern Survey does not include a margin of error in their own article about these statistics (see http://modernsurvey.com/news/?p=157#), but they do make the point that the “willing to go the extra mile” number is statistically significant. By omission, one would expect that they find the other results to be within the margin of error. That doesn’t make them meaningless, particularly when you have multiple results which point in the same general direction, in this case toward greater employee engagement, but it means the message cannot be stated as absolute. It appears that employees are more engaged as of February than they were in August of last year, and more data may well confirm that.
After some further work, I was able to calculate the margin of error to be very close to 3%. This is in line with what one would expect: a 6% change or larger is statistically significant with a 1,000 person sample, which is the sample size used by Modern Survey. In order to calculate where differences become statistically significant, one must double the margin of error to account for the smaller number going up that amount, and the larger going down that amount, which would eliminate or even reverse differences less than twice the margin of error. So, 6% change is required to be statistically significant in this case, and barely so, at that.
So, the numbers below can all be read as, “X percent, plus or minus 3.” This is why Modern Survey claims the “goes above and beyond” question resulted in a statistically significant difference–at a 6% increase from Aug 08 to Feb 09, it is just at the limit of the margin of error for their survey, and thus is significant from a purely statistical view.
To make the picture a bit more complete, here is a table showing the last three surveys Modern Survey did. I created this by simply combining the result reported by Modern Survey in November (http://modernsurvey.com/news/?p=124) with the one just reported which David Zinger and you, Phil, used in your recent posts.
What I find interesting is that there is no significant difference in the employee engagement numbers from August of 2007 to February of 2009. There is the obvious dip which was measured last August as the looming crisis was clearly visible to all, yet the numbers have already rebounded to the pre-recession results of 2007 by the time of the February 09 survey.
Modern Survey concludes in the more-recent article that employees are grateful to have a job at all, given the tremendous number of jobs lost in the last six months in particular, and that they are more willing to work hard in an effort to keep their jobs. This is a conclusion consistent with the one I proposed in yesterday’s comment.
One element no one has mentioned: the new administration in Washington. I’m willing to bet that some small portion of the upswing is attributable to a sense of hope. People are more willing to engage when they are hopeful. Maybe people are scared based upon recent evidence, yet hopeful based on a shared vision of what we may accomplish going forward.
In a sense, everyone was right on this one! The experts you cited, Phil, as claiming employee engagement had dropped were right at some point last fall, while it would appear that the losses of those early months of the recession have been wiped out as employees grow more determined to stay employed by working hard and being committed to their employers.
One way for managers to look at it: there is no better time to work toward greater engagement than when you already have your team’s attention as they seek to remain employed and are already open to stronger and more-fulfilling engagement.
How do YOU look at the reasons behind increased employee engagement?
Rick Hamrick is a Sufi mystic masquerading as a corporate IT manager-in-waiting. He is also the OFG, a proud PV, father of four marvelously creative and powerful daughters, and second banana to his wife, author Julia Rogers Hamrick.
Employee Engagement Increasing
Posted on 14. Apr, 2009 by Phil Gerbyshak in employee engagement
According to a recent survey conducted by Modern Survey, U.S. worker’s employee engagement is trending upwards:
Wow, this is shocking news to me! I’m shocked in a very good way.
The news and all the “experts” think employee engagement is decreasing, or at least should be decreasing in a bad economy, and now, a survey shows us that is wrong!
Maybe it’s increasing because managers are being more intentional about engagement now, and they realize with less ways to pay folks, they need to invest more time saying thank you and doing the little things that add up to a BIG boost in engagement.
Or maybe it’s something else.
Questions for you:
Why do you think employee engagement in the US is increasing?
Or do you think the survey just asked the wrong people?
Thanks to David Zinger for pointing this survey out.
Get to Know Your Team
Posted on 17. Feb, 2009 by Phil Gerbyshak in employee engagement
Think fast: How much do you know about your team?
Do you know…
- What their spouse’s/significant other’s name is?
- Children’s name (or a pet’s name if that’s important to them)?
- Why they first looked at the job they’re currently in?
- Do they have any friends that work with them?
- Favorite sports team?
- Favorite TV show?
- Favorite book?
- Favorite movie?
- Are they a morning person or a night owl?
The point of this is not to think about EVERY possible thing you can know about your team. The point is, you need to know what IS important to each member of your team, and make it important to you. You also should make every effort to learn a little more about your team whenever possible, so you can better relate to them, better understand them, and better reward them for the great work they do.
How can you get to know more about your team if you don’t have a lot of time?
- Ask questions.
- Listen to the answers.
- Share the answers with your boss.
- Repeat.
Last week we had a team meeting at 6:30 AM.
Yes, I know, I’m a terrible manager. 6:30 AM is REALLY early.
What can I say? I run a call center that requires coverage from 7:00 AM – 5:30 PM Monday through Friday.
Anyway, for the first 15 minutes of the movie, I asked everyone to share “What is the most recent movie you’ve seen?” or “What movie were you looking forward to seeing?”
KEY: I went first by sharing my movie, Friday the 13th (the new one) and how I enjoyed the original, even though it was cheesy.
I realized my team is VERY diverse. They watched Kung Fu movies, classic movies, no movies, artistic movies, wrestling movies, and computer terrorism movies. They teased each other a little about the choices in movies
I shared as much specifics as I could remember with my manager.
And then I asked her about HER recent movie. And we got to know each other a little bit better.
What movie have YOU recently seen or what movie are YOU really looking forward to seeing?
Ask questions. Listen to the answers. Share the answers with your boss. Repeat.
Movie theatre sign courtesy of geocam2000
Ask More Questions to Engage Others' Voices
Posted on 03. Feb, 2009 by Phil Gerbyshak in employee engagement
Recently I was asked to participate in the Engaging Voices project at Terry Seamon’s Here We Are Now What? blog. I wrote an article about the importance of asking questions to engage others’ voices.
Here’s a snippet:
One of the best ways to get employee engagement is to listen to others’ voices, for you are not alone in your quest to engage employees.
How do you listen to others’ voices?
Start by asking yourself “What will I do with the feedback I get from these other voices?” If you’re not willing to listen and take action on the trends you hear from those you ask questions of, don’t ask.
Read the rest of my article asking questions to engage others’ voices.
If you’re interested in reading others voices, check out:
- Michael Lee Stallard’s Weathering the Storm
- Tim Wright’s When the Going Gets Tough
- David Zinger’s How to Thrive in This Challenging Economy
And be sure to stay tuned to Here We Are Now What? for more engaging voices.
Green question mark courtesy of mikecogh
Free Ebook Report: Employee Engagement Advice for Organizations
Posted on 08. Jan, 2009 by Phil Gerbyshak in employee engagement
Need a little more employee engagement where you work? Who doesn’t!
Former co-editor of Slacker Manager David Zinger compiled 52 of the most powerful sentences for employee engagement and put them into a free employee engagement ebook. All the tips are from the amazing folks in the Employee Engagement Network, facilitated by David, and now over 680 people strong!
For those scoring at home, that’s 1 tip, per week that you could read and put into action, to greatly improve your company’s employee engagement.
Here’s a few of my favorites:
To connect “head and heart” connect every person’s daily activities (and results) to the organization’s goals. – Skip Reardon
Recognize contributions made by team members by telling them what they did, how it made a difference and “Thank you.” – Karl Edwards
Treat people with sincere courtesy and respect. – Jean Douglas
Easy to understand, and relatively easy to put into action.
Start today, start small, and start with your team. You can make a difference!
5, courtesy of cappellmeister & 2 courtesy of den99
Happy Employees Make Happy Customers!
Posted on 18. Dec, 2008 by Phil Gerbyshak in employee engagement
“The happier your employees are, the happier your customers are, and never the other way around!” – Phil Gerbyshak
One of the rules I’ve lived by as a manager is knowing I need to keep the folks that report to me happy, and they will keep our customers happy, and not the other way around. Though I’ve read from plenty of trusted sources that happy customers make happy employees, I’ve never ever seen that work in my life.
What do you think?
Do you think happy employees make happy customers, or do you think happy customers make happy employees?
Happy employees courtesy of darlene is evil
5 Ways to Ruin Employee Morale
Posted on 24. Sep, 2008 by Phil Gerbyshak in Phil Gerbyshak, employee engagement
Frequent commenter CK shared a response to 5 Ways to Improve Employee Morale that gave me pause. As a manager, I hope I don’t fall into the pit of despair CK’s management team has fallen into.
Job Fit – Get the person management wants (or recommended by the buddy system) and train them how to do the job they are hired to do. And if that doesn’t work out, hire a contractor to do the job and the employee to boss the contractor around.
Job Clarity – There is none. If management doesn’t like you they give you only half the information and watch you fail. This is dispite you asking for additional clarity!
Personal accountability – Only to the clique or the upper boss are you accountable. It’s a good thing the boss is a clique member as well!
Passion for work – WHY?!? You’ll get the same pay raise as everyone else! When you start out with more go-get-ers than slackers and they recieve the same amount of raises you’ll end up with more slackers!
“Take the shot” – is putting the gun to your head! No risk taking here! And if you fail – failure is not tolerated!
If these don’t kill your morale, nothing will!
What ways can you share that would ruin YOUR team’s morale?
