Jack Welch, the renowned business manager and former CEO of General Electric, once said of leadership, “It’s not about you; it’s about the people who work for you.” This is particularly true today given the rise of technology’s importance in business in recent years.
The complexity of today’s organizations, manufacturing processes, products, markets, economies and the technology required to operate and manage commerce in this global marketplace make it impossible for one person, no matter how talented, to accomplish much of anything on their own. It’s up to teams to get it done.
THE IMPORTANCE OF TEAMS
Understanding your team’s abilities, creating a productive work environment with them, and obtaining the necessary resources and support they need are all skills in a strong manager; but it’s the entire team who must work effectively together to deliver results.
High-performing teams are crucial to a successful business, but they need a manager with the right vision, skills and capabilities to lead the way. Managers with the ability to manage and orchestrate team to achieve results are critical to organizational success in today’s challenging global environment.
So how does a manager build, motivate and even inspire a team to deliver breakthrough results in these times of economic contraction, shrinking orders, job cuts and nearly constant admonitions to “do more with less”?
HARNESSING THE STRENGTH OF EMPLOYEES’ IDEAS
Employers are increasingly looking to both their employees and their customers to identify ways to improve their business performance. This is clear recognition that when driving innovation, improving customer service, and streamlining processes are needed, the frontline employees are rife with ideas.
Employees work in the company’s functional, production and support areas every day. They interact with customers on a face-to-face basis regularly. They see the gaps and the faults in processes. And they have well-informed ideas on how to address problems and drive improvements.
But it’s not enough to acknowledge your employees have good ideas. A robust process and even sophisticated electronic tools for large organizations are needed to mine, collect and manage employee ideas effectively.
For all but the smallest enterprises, the effectiveness of the Suggestion Box in the corner of the cafeteria is questionable. Studies show this method generates less than half of an idea per employee per year. Whereas sophisticated electronic tools can assist employees in not only communicating their ideas to the correct channels within the organization and developing them, but helping express the idea in an actionable format and receive timely acknowledgment.
Gathering ideas for improvement and acting on employees’ suggestions is only part of the solution, however.
ENGAGING EMPLOYEES TO ADVANCE FROM GOOD TO GREAT
Much is made of “employee engagement” in the human resources literature; and with good reason. Engaged employees deliver results in revenue growth, cost of goods sold, productivity, customer focus, turnover, financial performance and even stock price.
Employees are considered to be engaged when many different levels of employees are feeling fully involved and enthusiastic about their jobs and their organizations.
Engagement is defined as the willingness and ability to contribute to company success even by putting extra, discretionary effort into their work, which might take the form of extra time, brainpower and energy, according to a Towers Perrin study.
THE BUSINESS CASE FOR EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
An engaged workforce provides many intangible benefits for an enterprise; not the least of which is employee retention. In the past several years quantitative research studies have demonstrated a compelling business case for having an engaged workforce and the downside of having a workforce that is not engaged.
Highly engaged employees outperformed their disengaged colleagues by 20% to 28%, according to a Conference Board study released in 2006. And a 2005 study of 28 multinational companies by Serota Consulting found that the share prices of organizations with highly engaged employees rose by an average of 16% compared with an industry average of 6%.
There are costs associated with a disengaged workforce. Disengagement has been found to cost between $243 to $270 billion due to low productivity of disengaged workforces, according to a 2003 Gallup poll. In one 2003 study by ISR, companies with low levels of employee engagement found that their net profit fell by 1.38% and operating margin fell by 2.01% over a three-year period. Conversely, companies with high levels of engagement found that their operating margins rose by 3.74% over a three-year period.
GUIDELINES AND TOOLS FOR ENGAGING EMPLOYEES
A myriad of options and ideas exist to help leaders better engage employees in their company’s mission and vision. Here are a few of the best practices identified lately:
- Create two-way communication opportunities. Most organizations do well in communicating down from management to employees. But often missing are mechanisms for employees to communicate with management on a regular basis. Several ways to ensure two-way communication between employees and leaders include employee town halls, skip-level and diagonal slice meetings. In addition, brief quarterly online surveys that capture the changing concerns of employees can effectively supplement these two-way communications.
- Give clear, consistent direction to build leadership trust. Trust can be shattered instantly when executives appear to suddenly change directions or seem to break promises. Executives build trust by developing a clear vision of the organizations’ future and consistently communicating the same message over time to all employees across the organization.
- Include employees in defining solutions, making decisions. When employees participate in crafting solutions and can contribute to the decision-making in an enterprise, they buy into the solutions and feel more engaged in the organization. They also are more likely to go the extra mile to ensure a positive outcome.
- Ensure employees understand their role in organizational success. Employees need to understand how their job fits into the big picture and what they must do more of and do differently to help the business succeed. HR can help by clarifying what competencies and capabilities are needed to help the organization grow, and by helping employees upgrade their skills to match the needs of the future.
- Provide career development and growth opportunities. Levels of employee engagement also rise when there is a formal, visible career development system that includes components such as formal career tracks, mobility systems to help employees move about in the organization, and annual career conversations.
- Foster employee creativity. Creativity, like all living things, requires space, air and nutrients to grow. And since creativity is the gateway to innovation – a critical element of companies that want to advance – the ability to nurture creativity in people is a hallmark of a truly outstanding manager. To enable a safe and open environment where people can develop creatively, managers should seek opportunities to reward initiative, encourage experimentation, articulate clear goals, promote collaboration and allow time for reflection. No idea is a bad idea because often they can serve as a springboard to other ideas and innovative trains of thought.
People who are given the latitude to work in the style that best suits them in an atmosphere that inspires creativity will devote their best effort and deliver their best work, and that is the essence of employee engagement.
CONCLUSION
“The day you become a leader, it becomes about them,” Jack Welch says. “Your job is to take people who are already great and make them unbelievable.”
Starting out as professionals focused on individual performance, the most effective managers metamorphose into coaches who motivate, support, teach, break down barriers and find resources for employees, and in the process they become great managers themselves.
