Draw Your Line in the Sand
Posted on 15. Aug, 2011 by Shawn Murphy in 1 Leadership
There’s both opportunity and heavy lifting needed to improve the workplace environment in America. According to Gallup’s Work Environment Index, for over 3 years US workplaces can hardly crack a score of 50 on the well-being index. This is out of a score of 100 measuring ideal employee well-being.
Gallup includes in its Work Environment Index (a measure of well-being) these items:
- Job satisfaction
- Use of strengths at work
- How a supervisor treats employees
- Open and trusting environment
Sure at first it’s easy to be disturbed and angered by such low numbers. And I hope as a leader you are disturbed and angry…for a moment. Because we need you to be clear minded to help your team, your company do better.
Before you can do better, we need you to draw your line in the sand.
On one side is now: the day you were unaware of the unacceptable score that nearly 50 represents.
The other side is tomorrow. We need you to be in action to develop a plan to help raise the index score to 60 or even higher.
The line in the sand represents a commitment to help improve the work environment.
Improve job satisfaction.
Tap into the talents your employees bring to the table.
Improve how you treat, communicate, interact with employees.
Restore trust.
The outcome of these things in this post Great-Recession era is restored optimism in the workplace. The optimism that invites employees to enjoy their work and make dramatic improvements to the products and services your company sells. Without the optimism, you’ve got worried employees distracted from their craft. Distracted from making a difference within the company that increases profits. A lack of meaningful work.
Draw your line in the sand. Focus on what’s possible. Not what’s holding you, them, us back.
2 Responses to “Draw Your Line in the Sand”
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Valerie Iravani
15. Aug, 2011
Hello Shawn, While there is a lot of talk about employee engagement, most companies fail to define an actionable plan to increase the knowledge management within their company. Sometimes, companies go so far as to provide a broad framework for everyone through training on such concepts as Tribal Leadership and project management teams.
Where the failure occurs is in challenging influencers throughout the company at all levels to generate ideas on how to ‘pull’ knowledge and creativity from all employees, regardless of their job functions.
As an example, I have five direct reports in AR/Collections. All have at least 10 years of business experience, or more, and all have college degrees. Yes, there is no direct structure for them to explore what other tasks we can complete to bring value to the company (other than invoicing, collections and customer service). Our daily functions are fairly routine and repetitive. Little encouragement is given to do anything else.
Therefore, in as a manager, I have made it my mission to provide ideas and methods for encouraging my direct reports to express their personal passions and experience (such as ‘green’ practices, parenting, networking and social media) in ways that add value to the company through increasing brand recognition and process improvement.
While my current company has several managers who are empathetic and creative managers, who are also facilitating knowledge management and employee engagement, we need a way to spread these traits and behaviors.
Most of the companies I have worked for in the past have little or no strategy for increasing employee engagement beyond a very minimal amount of succession planning and cross training.
Specific recommendation: provide training and coaching to front line supervisors and middle managers to know their employees as individuals – their personal values, expertise and interests – and to network directly with other departmental managers to ‘share’ resources to provide idea generation. The Tribal Leadership concepts of Triads is a channel for some of this networking and conversation.
One part of the managers/supervisors’ responsibilities should be to produce a personal development plan with each employee that encompasses personal and professional development that supports the company’s strategic imperatives and the employees future life plans.
For those who have never performed any of these activities, they are no harder than having one on one feedback meetings with each employee every month, and meeting with 2-3 managers in other departments once each month.
I challenge managers and influencers in all industries to try this.
Shawn Murphy
17. Aug, 2011
Valerie,
You’ve got a blog post worth of content here! I hope managers and influencers rise to your challenge. It’s one that I see can create optimism in the workplace.
Create comment.
Shawn