The recession has slashed employment and those still working are being asked to “do more.” Productivity, as a result, is skyrocketing. But at what cost? Are you setting your company up for a crisis when jobs come back and your over-worked staff has the chance to seek greener pastures? Re-engage those people NOW, or risk a stampede out the door.
Companies seek to, and usually do, hire great talent. When that talent fails to produce, it is usually the corporate culture’s fault, not the employee’s. Blame lies with the cultural hurdles that hinder talented people’s ability to contribute. Change corporate mindsets to eliminate the hurdles and unleash a ton of worker energy.
Reorganizations have to be one of the most destructive forces in business. They sap motivation, dis-engage workers, and flatten morale, all exactly the opposite of what the company usually is trying to accomplish. But, fully engaged staffs will reorganize organically from the ground up, if you unleash their ability to contribute.
Expand your view of time management to include “energy management” as a factor in conquering tasks and objectives. Your time is finite, but you can increase the amount of energy you commit to your professional and personal lives.
The success of the company, and the employee’s perceived role in it have as great an impact. Engagement levels trump satisfaction levels as the key measure of an employee’s desire to stay or go.
McKinsey and Co. executive surveys confirm that focusing on “People Issues” does have a significant return-on-investment, especially when trying to transform culture and improve performance.
Here is a classic McKinsey summary from 2003 of the critical importance of “changing mindsets” to truly foster better productivity.
This Economist columnist makes a good point at the difference between “engagement” and “fun” in the workplace.
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And for subscribers only: This opinion piece discusses the folly of trying to ban social media access at the office.
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Best Practices for Performance Reviews
by Brooke Bovo
Over 20 years ago one of the best bosses I ever had told me the secret to performance reviews.
Let me share that secret with you now.
Performance reviews are a two-way street. Your annual review should just be a formal written report that recaps and supports the regular feedback you and your boss have exchanged every day. Your review should practically write itself because on a daily basis your direct supervisor will have told you either: you are doing a great job, or if you do this task a little differently I think you will get a better result. (For a perspective on what is wrong with most corporate review processes, click here.)
Good Bosses Responsibilities. Good bosses clearly communicate desired outcomes. They may suggest strategies or methods for achieving those outcomes. They point out possible roadblocks and potential problems. And they manage each employee in a manner appropriate for the employee’s experience level and personality, checking in on a regular basis to ask about successes and setbacks.
With a brand new direct report top managers check in frequently. In critical applications there might be informal contacts every hour or even more often. These contacts aren’t formal meetings. They can be brief phone calls, emails, brief hallway chats or simply dropping by the employee’s workstation.
On more routine assignments, with more established employees, regular contacts might be informal communications (emails and the like) backed up by an open door policy and regular – ever week or so – brief, focused one-on-one meetings.
My boss’s parting comment was, if your boss isn’t talking with you one-on-one at least twice a month you both have a problem.
Good Employees Responsibilities.
One of your goals as an employee is to have the boss value you and be glad to see you. Mostly because you are a great employee – you are a great employee, aren’t you? – and because the meetings are useful – you provide information on successes or critical “heads up” information that can be reported to upper management which is good for both of you – and the meetings give you both the opportunity to strategize how to overcome problems.
When you start a new project, be sure to ask enough questions so that you clearly understand the task. You need to know about priority, resources and deadlines. You might not get all this information right away. Ask as many questions as you reasonably can. Then build a list of important questions to ask later, either in person or via email.
Just like you, bosses hate to be surprised. Most of the time, regular updating prevents embarrassing surprises and uncomfortable performance reviews.
Brooke is a principal partner with Bovo-Tighe, and has been helping corporate executives and their subordinates communicate better for over twenty years. Hit the Contact Us link to track her down.
No One Was Ever Motivated by a Meeting
By Steve Eddy
Thinking about getting some of the folks with whom you work together for a meeting? Think twice about that if your justification for conducting this meeting includes ANY of the following:
- Obtaining ‘STATUS’ updates from everyone. In the 21st Century, status updates can go out electronically, and be logged easily in one central place (Lotus Notes, Google Docs…) where everyone involved promises to go post updates. Your job as a BOSS (however defined), is to follow-up to cement good update behavior. Only meet when your team reports a lack of progress, and individual meetings do not resolve the problems. That is, have meetings to agree on useful changes in group behavior, not just to discuss the behavior itself.
- Launching an ‘initiative’ (Just say “No!” to initiatives…). Unless the participants are being asked to contribute thoughts and feedback to the initiative, why waste their time gathering to hear announcements that can be delivered electronically? Feedback can also be gathered quite productively via survey in this 21st Century without forcing people to air their ideas in public! Just as with marketing focus groups, in meetings the smartest input is often overwhelmed by the loudest input.
- Meeting without a specific, documented AGENDA, and an ironclad time limit. Meetings cost money (employee hourly rate x number of participants x time of meeting). The meeting therefore must have an outcome that earns the company at least that much in return. Put another way: This meeting will make a decision that has a $$ value of XXX, so we should do this in ½ hour or 1 hour. Lots of meetings are wasted talk. People thinking out loud or posturing. Strict agendas and time limits cut out that meeting “fat”.
- Doing anything that will NOT require minutes to be written down, and distributed to all attendees, WITH ACTION ITEMS AND DEADLINES. If people leave the meeting without assignments, tasks, responsibilities or items for follow-up, why meet? No progress has been made.
- Delivering a ‘one way’ message to your troops or peers, aka: Passing-on the meeting-equivalent of a big, fat ‘FYI’ email. The term “Meeting” should always imply that a conversation or dialogue will occur, NOT a lecture or monologue.
- Inviting people who will not instantly know ‘why?’ they should attend.
- Setting an open-ended, non-specified, meeting duration. People feigning their death or going into convulsions during a meeting may be indications that you are doing this (I am not completely joking either)
- Showing-off your skills in utilizing PowerPoint. Black text on plain white slides is all that is required 95% of the time. Fancy formatting and animation get in the way of the content, and extend the meeting needlessly.
- Allowing people to “multi-task”, texting, answering e-mails… When decisions must be made (have I mentioned that is the main purpose of meeting?) full attention is required.
- Exhorting your people to higher levels of performance without simultaneously providing them with the tools or resources needed to do so.
- Using a meeting to express displeasure with just one of the attendees; Why wastes a whole team’s time to compensate for your unwillingness to confront the particular person in a one-on-one fashion?
What to do, then, if I can’t fill my time with meetings?
Celebrate! And you can still run meetings. Simply omit the errors I have listed here. Keep this mantra with you:
Your meetings must support Unshakable Trust, Pursuit of Truth, and Communication That Counts.
Measure your meeting plans against these three goals, and you will find yourself running fewer, shorter, more powerful meetings. If you are unsure about how to make meetings useful rather than roadblocks, get professional help! That small investment could reap a huge return in happier, more productive people around you. I know it works, having facilitated such transitions hundreds of times in the last 25 years.
Steve Eddy is a senior consultant with Bovo-Tighe and has worked for years to eradicate the useless meeting from corporate life.