Armed with a license to achieve excellence and peak performance, leaders
today must continue to stay fresh, stimulating their employees with a proven and
exciting engagement process. Even after they setout to defeat mediocrity and the
many villains against success for their organizations in a high stakes game of
change, their loyalties continue to be tested when things don't always go as
planned. While the leadership strategies for the organization remain under
constant attack, leaders must destroy the threats, no matter how personal the
cost.
Now, if you think that this sounds like a multi-million dollar film trailer
taken directly from a 007 James Bond film, you're right. As a Bond fan over the
last four decades and now an entrepreneur responsible to lead my organizational
leaders towards my vision for a promised Future Picture, my role for the company
seems to be similar to the feats faced by Bond himself. Employee engagement and
retention today feels like a Daniel Craig Casino Royale or Skyfall mission
against the menacing outside world looking to dismantle the leadership goals
that are in place to protect the organization. However, what's critical for
leaders to understand is how the two have emerged as the greatest challenge
facing talent management initiatives now more than any time before.
Similar to past periods of economic instability, leaders remain constant in
their focus on the financial aspects of the organization rather than the
professional development or the workforce. Similarly, research shows that they
are placing less emphasis on employee engagement even with unemployment rates
leveling off. A significant mistake leaders are making is to think that current
employees are happy to have a job causing them to spend little to no time on the
engagement aspect in talent management. This mindset is not only inaccurate, but
it is outright wrong. During times on economic instability, organizations are
more prone to loosing top performers. Employees are looking to be challenged,
valued and made to feel a significant part of a system where their voice is not
only heard, but trusted in a way that it matters to the overall mission.
With these things in mind, this segment of the series is focused on an
innovative way for leaders to Target-Identify-Minimize-Execute employee
engagement in order to reap the tangible and intangible benefits for the
organization as well as for the employees. Research has also shown that there
are clear correlations between employee engagement, performance, productivity
and ultimately profitability.
Here at DPI Consulting, we believe that professional development using an
innovative approach is essential for accomplishing effective employee
engagement, increasing performance and productivity and ultimately
profitability. A specific innovative approach introduced for employee engagement
is known as TIME, and as leaders learn to use the approach as a strategic tool
to achieve their employee goals, turnover and absenteeism will be decreased,
while productivity and profitability increases. TIME for employee engagement and
retention is defined as:
- Target the right energy.
- Identify the efforts for good growth.
- Minimize unnecessary behaviors that cause poor habits.
- Execute strategic initiatives for employees to integrate
welcomed innovation into the organization.
With opportunities to decrease turnover and absenteeism and increase
productivity and profitability, this innovative approach might be worth paying
attention to for leaders to overcome the villains to success within their
employee engagement initiatives. TIME as an innovative approach is used to
successfully engage and retain current staff within the workplace. For your
review, we've outlined each segment in the TIME strategy that's essential for
engaging and retaining top performers throughout your organization's talent
lifecycle.
Target the right energy.
There are two things that every organization must do to Target the right energy.
First, leaders must establish a well designed employment brand. This is no
different than establishing a brand for your organization. It builds the
organization using the people first concept to tell a story about the
organization and its strategic intent.
This strategy allows for current and future candidates to gage a story about the
organization's direction for the Future Picture. Establishing an employment
brand also works as a recruiting tool in today's social media climate. Now that
sites such as LinkedIn allows for organizations to have a corporate page whereby
the employees of the firm are able to connect, the organization is able to
establish a reputation about the type of workplace and if it's a good place to
work that will help to ensure a steady stream of candidates in the pipeline. The
employment brand must become an integral component in the organization's talent
management process and when achieved, your employees will become the life of
your healthy brand.
Next, establish and maintain a robust employee pipeline. Why is this so
critical? Simply because of change. As the needs of the organization remain in a
transitional state, leaders will become efficient when filling the needs
throughout the system with highly qualified personnel. Employment branding is
essential here because it helps the pipeline build organically ready to ear mark
future staff associates for specific positions. Establishing and maintaining a
robust employee pipeline doesn't mean simply collecting resumes. Leaders need to
be proactive in vetting future staff so that when the time comes to fill an
opportunity for the organization, they are able to target the right energy for
the right opportunity.
Debrief: When leaders Target the right energy, they must
establish a well designed employment brand and establish and maintain a robust
employee pipeline.
Identify the efforts for good growth.
Good growth can only be achieved when leaders practice effective communications
with their employees. Communication is a contact sport that requires two sides
to engage in a team sport to ensure both sides have their FEET on stable ground
and pointing in the right direction to secure the Future Picture. This can only
be achieved when they understand fully what is going on to identify how to
communicate their intentions towards their critical successes. Communicating
their intentions is done through Expressive Leadership; traits used by leaders
and teams to effectively communicate the direction that arrives at excellence.
Leaders do not command excellence; they communicate their intent for and build
towards excellence. Excellence is “ensuring everyone understands how to Better
their Best” within the bounds of doing what is right for the team or
organization. Expressive Leadership is also a form of influence used within
team-led environments before, during and after a mission is underway to improve
communications, while removing any chance of failure. It is a major contribution
to, and a significant trait found within the efforts for good growth that
achieves effective employee engagement.
Employees want to feel valued. A critical mistake that some leaders make is a
lack of communication that causes employees to disengage. Employees very easily
believe that they are just another individual in an organization that only cares
about making revenue. Expressive Leadership offers its own philosophy that
starts off by asking leaders to consider carrying forward the impact of tough
and somewhat fierce conversations that do not feel good in the moment, but serve
an overall objective for employee engagement in the long-run. This trait makes
room for enhanced compassion, empathy, caring and praise throughout the overall
team and workplace. It offers opportunities that cut to the chase to ensure that
all communications are clear and precise leaving little-to-no room for misguided
intent. It also builds improved proficiencies that leverage Aristotle's “Golden
Mean” philosophy; explaining how there's a desirable middle between two extremes
and employee engagement along with effective communications represent the two
extremes.
The other thing that leaders must do to identify efforts for good growth is to
offer continuous training and development for their employees. Satisfaction with
training and development are key factors influencing employee engagement,
especially when leaders invest in good growth areas for the firm and employee's
role within the organization (a good growth way to leverage Aristotle's “Golden
Mean” philosophy). Employee engagement means knowledge sharing and studies have
shown that specific topic areas such as leadership and teambuilding
(collaboration) increases retention and engagement to make a significant
difference. Establishing an employee professional development program that
provides extended training programs in various areas sends a strong message that
the organization values the individual's employment.
Just the opposite, certain schools of thought argue that poor leadership and
non-effective communication within an organization is the root of most problems
in employee disengagement scenarios. Employee satisfaction is directly related
to satisfaction with their direct leadership team. Unsatisfied employees are
characteristically disengaged. To rectify the challenges that lead to
disengagement (a failure to fully understand the contact sport), leading
organizations have recognized the critical importance of instituting
professional development initiatives and programs to include effective
communications and strategic leadership that stimulate the engagement and
learning process.
Debrief: When leaders Identify the efforts for good growth to
increase employee engagement, they must fully understand the contact sport of
effective communications, while striving to develop a workplace that encourages
training, professional development and knowledge sharing.
Minimize unnecessary behaviors that cause poor habits.
Employee engagement is not about developing more structure, more systems or more
processes. It is not about fixing anything, or changing anything. It is not
about better ways of “doing” something. It is not change management or
re-engineering or even strategic planning as you might know it. It is not about
implementing a better methodology or about process improvement. It is not about
raising team member's morale. It is not about higher productivity or better
leadership.
While these things are tremendously useful for organizational performance, they
are not the focus of the work a leader should be doing to ensure their employees
remain engaged. At the same time, they all do occur naturally in the process of
a full-scale employee engagement initiative where leaders are focused on
improving talents within their organization. Now at this point you should be
thinking, “This guy has gone mad!” The truth of the matter is all of these
things are what every leader and organization should already be doing anyway,
but leaders find themselves stuck in the weeds doing the work in the
organization, while spending little time doing the work on the organization.
Spending more time working in versus working on the organization creates a
series of bad habits that in the end will ultimately lead to a crash-and-burn
situation. This behavior sends a contrasting message to employees that revenue
is the only thing that matters. The key is to minimize these unnecessary
behaviors that cause poor habits.
Employee engagement is about what naturally makes teams great! When leaders
decide to do the opposite – spending more time working on the organization and
less time working in the organization – the organization has a better chance of
improving the employee engagement process. By removing themselves from the weeds
and changing their altitude (perspective and vision), leaders have a better
chance to Identify the efforts for good growth, while minimizing unnecessary
behaviors that cause poor habits to be developed, matured and repeated. This is
the beginning of a good growth situation that leads to better habits and
effective employee engagement.
Employee engagement is about team associates, leaders and employees, aligning on
a shared future and mission, committing to shared values and principles, and
then bringing into existence effective engagement for the whole organization
(give and take) whereby everyone wins. Its about providing direction, clear
direction, for the organization using the team's precise actions to achieve all
assigned objectives and goals within each mission it is assigned. It is about
unleashing the natural power inherent in an organization where people are
passionately committed to fulfilling a vision. It is about every individual in
the organization making a valued contribution for which they can be proud. It is
about people working together synergistically, in coordinated action, to
accomplish what they hold as highly desirable.
Employee engagement is about supporting employees in creating a new
organizational and team-led context in which far-reaching transformation can
occur rapidly and effortlessly. It is about generating a freshly stated employee
and team-led context in which improvements, implementing new methodologies,
committing to new standards of excellence, developing new capacities, developing
new habits and setting new performance principles are a natural occurrence.
While much of employee engagement is about developing great teams who understand
how to chart the path of organizational politics, it is far from “soft.” It
deals with the tough operational issues that must be resolved for teams working
in concert with their organizations to accomplish the extraordinary. Issues like
commitment, accountability, contribution and remaining on task to achieve an
assigned mission flawlessly and strategically (the team's integrity and
character), open and honest communication, trust, possibility, empowering others
and ultimately producing results. It has to do with people going beyond their
perceived limits for their team, individually and collectively, and having fun
in the process. Employee engagement is about positioning the organization to
become a place where teams thrive because of the standards set by everyone, and
where they do great work without asking for rewards. They just do… and all else
follows!
Debrief: When leaders Minimize unnecessary behaviors that cause
poor habits, they are able to focus on identifying the efforts for good growth
to improve employee engagement that leads to better habits forming throughout
the organization. This also improves the employment brand that establishes and
maintains a robust employee pipeline in the end.
Execute strategic initiatives for employees to integrate welcomed
innovation into the organization.
As so eloquently stated by David Zinger, M.Ed., author of “Zengage: How to get
more Into your work to get more Out of your work,” employees are responsible for
their own engagement, we are all accountable for everyone's engagement. No one
has a bigger role in engagement than the individual themselves – if engagement
is to be, it must be up to me.
We are accountable for other people's engagement and we can influence their
engagement, but at the same time, leaders must be willing to execute strategic
initiatives for employees to integrate welcomed innovation into the
organization. If engagement is to be, it must be up to WE!
Debrief: When leaders Execute strategic initiatives for
employees to integrate welcomed innovation into the organization, employee
engagement becomes the work of everyone. No one has a bigger role in engagement
than the individual themselves. Ultimately, employee engagement is a serious
contact sport with everyone having a key role in the game if a win is to be
achieved.
Establishing an effective employee engagement and retention process means that
leaders must do what is necessary to wake-up their employees with a well
designed innovative process. Everyone has to have some skin in the game if this
contact sport has any chance of being successful. As stated earlier in the
article, employees are looking to be challenged, valued and made to feel a
significant part of a system where their voice is not only heard, but trusted in
a way that it matters to the overall mission. TIME offers a strategic option for
everyone to Target-Identify-Minimize-Execute a successful employee engagement
process to reap the tangible and intangible benefits for the organization as
well as everyone involved.
It would be wise for leaders to use their time wisely to ensure that an
efficient use of energy and strategy encompasses the professional development
process for the employees. Employee engagement and retention means WAKING UP
everyone to new perspectives and an innovative approach to achieving what needs
to be done to get to the finish line and winning together.
I'll look forward to seeing you in the next part of the series titled
“Collaboration and Reciprocity MUST BE Rooted in Employee Engagement to Ensure
Employee Retention.”