How are your Actions Driving Outcomes?

Managerial actions drive employee beliefs; employee beliefs drive their actions and employee actions drive results.  However, I contend that your management not only changes behavior by their actions, but by their inactions as well. Maximizing employee engagement requires that you analyze your actions or lack thereof - and how those actions influence others in the workplace.

Quality problems, productivity problems and cost problems are the consequences of your employee behaviors and is often based on what is being reinforced by your senior leadership team.  Behaviors associated with undesirable outcomes are being reinforced by either negative reinforcement or positive reinforcement.   For example, if your employees are taking shortcuts in safety and quality, the naturally occurring positive consequences with doing the job with less effort will cause the undesirable behaviors to continue.

Negative reinforcement will decrease desired behavior.  Threats and fear lead to resistance and generates just enough behavior from your employees to escape or avoid punishment.  For example, if you stay late to revise a presentation so the first draft is perfect so your boss won’t chew you out – often you will do the minimum required not to get chewed out.  This does not encourage your employees to work hard, innovate or produce quality products as the main focus is on the boss and his actions and not the task at hand.  In addition, your ingrained beliefs about your boss will hinder efforts to produce your best efforts in the future.

Some other perceived negative consequences are unintended by your senior leadership team - such as requiring extra effort to learn a process.   Your employees will resist that which is not simple.  Another example of a negative consequence is when your manager assigns you extra projects because they ‘know you’ll get the job done’ and you get behind in your primary work – creating additional stress surrounding performance.

I cannot stress enough that most consequences are unintentional on senior leadership’s part.  However, intent does not determine effect.  Consequence is determined by person who receives it.  Inadvertent punishment can be just as harmful as direct punishment.

For example, your employee does something positive and nothing happens.  The employee then tells anyone who will listen, “Nobody appreciates anything I do around here!”  This is counter intuitive to many managers – as most managers feel that doing nothing has no effect on performance.  It is easier to do nothing when you don’t know what to do – but if employees take the initiative to go above and beyond and there is no favorable consequence – then at some point they will stop.

Let’s say you have 30 employees and 27 perform well and 3 are problem performers.  If the majority of your time is spent on putting policies and procedures in place to align the problem performers then you are ignoring the good performance that makes an organizational successful.  Instead, you should focus on identifying behaviors that will produce desired outcomes and arrange desired meaningful consequences to positively reinforce them.  This is the only way to maximize performance and to generate more behavior than is minimally required.  For example, in regard to the quality example given earlier.  If I buy an employee a cup of coffee while discussing the improved quality of his or her work – then the quality will go up even higher the following week. 

Idea Share Tip of the Month!

Help your employees find meaning at work by connecting with your employees and being empathetic to their needs and issues.  Create the freedom for your employees to be creative and come up with great ideas.

Sign up for the Idea Share Tip of the Week! at Frame of Mind Consulting

Frame of Mind Consulting understands the unique DNA of your organization, which is necessary to turn any organization into one capable of leveraging the full idea potential of its employees.  Would you like to drive connectivity and ownership throughout your company?  Contact Page at (860) 559-7942 to set up your complimentary consultation during which you will receive some invaluable tips that you can apply to your business right away.

Have You Dropped the Engagement Ball?

Surveys are not the be-all and end-all of employee engagement.  As senior leadership we often put HR or a third party administrator in charge of the end to end process when the entire leadership team needs to be invested in employee engagement.  Surveys provide perspective, but do not provide a full picture of the engagement levels in your company or the beliefs and behavior that drive your employees, as the survey is too narrow in focus.

Surveys are retrospective in nature and are not-forward looking.  To make matters worse, we as senior leadership often lack follow through on our learning from the survey, causing our employees to feel further demoralized - "management doesn't care what I think" or "why should I submit ideas - management doesn't listen anyway.”  I have heard employees echo these sentiments time and time again.  We as leadership, may tackle surface issues that have the largest gap in measurement – those short-term issues that are an easy fix – but we often struggle with the deeper cultural issues that require long-range planning.

A secondary issue is the accuracy of engagement surveys.  As I mentioned above, it is common for our employees to believe that management won’t take action on the issues or our employees see the survey as unhelpful and time wasting.   Our employees then either bias their answers or don’t participate in the survey at all – which results in inflation of engagement results.  Remember anybody can check off a box on a survey – the real test is your employees’ behavior that drives organizational outcomes.

Engagement of our employees is not an item on a to-do list or a nice to have.  Engagement must integrate into the fabric of our organizations.  The first step is to make sure your management team, at all levels, is properly trained on engagement.  Management is often promoted due to technical skills, not their people skills.  Our managers need to be trained on relationship building and to communicate on the proper things.

The second step is to really dive in and get to know your employees.  I know you’ve heard it before.  Get out of your office and into their environment.  Learn what matters to your employees. Think about your own job and how you connect it to what matters most in your life.  Talk and actively listen to your employees, get to know their fears, understand their concerns, and learn about their families.  Get to the heart of their experiences, for that drives their behavior.  Get to know those shades of grey you just can’t get from a survey.  Only then can we as leadership truly connect and ‘engage’ with our employees.

Finally, create a five year rolling plan with a few realistic, yet achievable set objectives for each year based on what you learn from your employees. Only by changing the dialogue in your organization from top down to bi-directional with your employees can you truly drive your organization forward to the next level.

Idea Share Tip of the Month!

Create a culture of transparency where mistakes are freely talked about and you will understand better how to address problems.  Employee interviews with an unaffiliated professional may be effective to understand the reality of your operating environment.

Sign up for the Idea Share Tip of the Week! at Frame of Mind Consulting

Frame of Mind Consulting understands the unique DNA of your organization, which is necessary to turn any organization into one capable of leveraging the full idea potential of its employees. Would you like to drive connectivity and ownership throughout your company?  Contact Page at (860) 559-7942 to set up your complimentary consultation during which you will receive some invaluable tips that you can apply to your business right away.

Ideas: The Stepping Stones to your Success!

Last month I wrote about the pitfalls surrounding a traditional suggestion program where ideas go to die. This month I would like to discuss the benefits of having a simple, focused and powerful system for generating, capturing and implementing ideas where ideas become the stepping stones to your success! 

An organized system enables you to effectively manage and execute your ideas and results in less confusion and complexity. It also increases connectivity and ownership as it allows your employees to channel their energy towards ideas that require action instead of them falling flat. The system becomes a visual platform to prioritize ideas and for employees to see the ideas they are going to pursue in a way that helps us and others relate to them.  Without structure ideas fail to build upon one another.  An organized system also has a built in feedback loop.  This is a key missing element in the suggestion box type of program.

Most companies are better at blocking and snuffing out ideas rather than promoting them. Streamlining operations or being cost effective is no longer enough in today’s competitive environment. Leadership is being continuously asked to do more with less, which is a big for reason flagging profits and increased competition. Leadership is then stuck with too few resources in terms of time, money and people and is operating in survival mode. They then do not allocate the proper resources to the idea system for it to be successful. When constantly putting out fires, the challenge then becomes following through on ideas. To follow through on ideas successfully, you need those things that leadership is short of – time, money and people to evaluate and implement ideas.You also need time to properly train and direct management and employees.

Promoting new ideas can turn your organization into a top performing idea generating company that may result in entirely new business opportunities, innovative product lines, services and processes. Promoting new ideas increases cash flow as ideas may improve old products, services and processes or revitalize markets. Promoting ideas creates a learning organization as everyone is trained to see problems as opportunities and are empowered to develop solutions to complex business problems. Implementing ideas effectively requires an incremental process which requires idea exploration, information gathering and research, experimentation and testing, as well as feedback. Your idea system becomes an immense learning and development tool - every idea incorporates inquiry and learning which drives your organization forward.  Ideas become the stepping stones to your success.

Idea Share Tip of the Month!

An ineffective idea system will demoralize employees and result in fewer ideas than no idea system at all.

Sign up for the Idea Share Tip of the Week! at Frame of Mind Consulting

Hartford CT/ Springfield Area:  Page will be speaking on November 18th on the topic of:  Talent and Imagination:  Map Out the Social Power in Your Organization.  For more details and to register, please visit http://bit.ly/1OJlGdt 

Frame of Mind Consulting understands the unique DNA of your organization, which is necessary to turn any organization into one capable of leveraging the full idea potential of its employees. Would you like to drive connectivity and ownership throughout your company?  Contact Page at (860) 559-7942 to set up your complimentary consultation during which you will receive some invaluable tips that you can apply to your business right away.

Overcoming THAT Stigma...

An employee idea system works with other improvement initiatives to drive forward organizational performance.  However, executives in many of the companies that have formal employee suggestion programs don't see the programs as critical contributors to their bottom line.  Most managers have experience with only the suggestion box type of system, which are ineffective – and the mere suggestion of a suggestion program carries with it that stigma which must be overcome.  The stigma is that suggestion programs do not have any impact and are fact often poked fun at. 

The reason many suggestion programs are ineffective are that the actions many managers take are counterintuitive to what they should be doing to achieving an effective idea management system.  There is a clear difference between a suggestion program which is like a black hole where ideas go to die and an employee idea management system which actively manages the ideas in your company.

When leaders feel they can trust their employees to make decisions about their own ideas, the question then becomes how to design a system that operationalizes this trust.  Most leaders assume that they can achieve this themselves by simply layering an evaluation process on top of existing organizational layers and practices.  Let’s explore why this is a problem by exploring some of the pitfalls of a typical suggestion program.

Pitfall Number 1:  How a typical suggestion program collects ideas:

Ideas that are collected are often limited by the ideas that employees come up based on their own limited perspective based on their role within the company.  There is little incentive to push the scope beyond that or to challenge the status quo.  The process is limited to solutions and does not accept problems.  In addition, a suggestion program does not focus employees in on your company’s strategic goals.  What does “we want you to give us your ideas” even mean?  I’m confused and so are your employees.

Pitfall Number 2:  How a typical suggestion program evaluates ideas:

A typical suggestion program is slow and bureaucratic because of how ideas are evaluated.  A manager is often assigned to monitor, evaluate and track ideas in addition to their regular work.  Ideas then get low priority and a slow response time.  In short, implementation becomes a lot of extra work on very few people in the company.   Secondly, oftentimes ideas are not vetted by colleagues who understand the underlying problems and consider alternate solutions.  They may have little understanding of context of the idea and feel little urgency about the underlying problem, especially if it doesn’t directly affect them or their department.  Lastly, the pressure and risk of approving an idea means rejecting the idea is safer than accepting it.  This creates a strong bias towards rejecting ideas.  If the evaluator approves the idea, they accept some responsibility if it fails.  By rejecting it and doing nothing – it will not make anything worse.

Pitfall Number 3:  How a typical suggestion program holds people accountable:

A typical suggestion program does not integrate into the DNA of your company and how your employees work on a daily basis, so front-line employees are not empowered to take initiative. There is no feedback loop built in so there is little accountability for management follow-through.

The reality of the situation is that without a simple and focused idea system to actively manage your ideas, they can become a distraction.  When ideas are handled in an ad hoc manner, it is confusing to your employees, your vendors and your customers. 

Idea Share Tip of the Month!

Management should not become a judge of ideas.  It is too easy for them to brush them under the carpet, be too busy to evaluate them, play favoritism or take credit for ideas brought to them.

Sign up for the Idea Share Tip of the Week! at Frame of Mind Consulting

Frame of Mind Consulting understands the unique DNA of your organization, which is necessary to turn any organization into one capable of leveraging the full idea potential of its employees.  Would you like to drive connectivity and ownership throughout your company?  Contact Page at (860) 559-7942 to set up your complimentary consultation during which you will receive some invaluable tips that you can apply to your business right away!

Are you Contributing to the Pipe Dream?

In a perfect world, your employees would align themselves with strategic targets and not focus on their own agenda.  But we are not living in a pipe dream – we operate in reality.  Often, we fall short of getting our employees truly invested in their jobs.  We hear employees say such things as “I am just here to collect a paycheck – I don’t have to think about solutions” or your employees sit on the sidelines with a 'wait and see' attitude.  Sound familiar?

Today, I am going to touch upon how you, as a decision maker, can release control and build trust with your employees so they make better decisions and produce better results. 

1.  Provide a clear definition of success that makes conclusions clear.  Vague objectives result in a vague focus.  Keep communication simple so employees can repeat it to others.  Take time to align around what you should communicate and not just what – but WHEN to communicate it.

2.  It is crucial that you talk with and not at your employees by communicating in terms of what matters most to them. How your employees work on a daily basis is an important consideration in your communications.  What do they actually need to know to achieve the strategic goals of the company?  

3.  Whether you seek it or not – your employees’ perspective is their reality and pretending it doesn't exist – doesn't mean it doesn't.  Solicit their feedback and more important act on that feedback!  Allow your employees to grow your business!

4.  Paint a clear picture of the case of change through stories.  What will be the impact of the change and how does that affect their jobs?  Link where you are and where you are going with what you have done and what you are going to do.  Build enough momentum going forward to convince those who are sitting on the sidelines with a ‘wait and see’ attitude.

5.  Give up some measure of control by trusting your employees and allow them enough room to find their own way from point A to point B. Provide them with a loose road map and let them navigate it. When you tell your employees what to do you are taking accountability away from them.  Furthermore, if you tell them what to do and you turn out to be wrong – you have lost credibility with your employee base and it is twice as hard to win that trust back.  Be a guide and a mentor, as well as a leader!

Idea Share Tip of the Month!

Create buy-in with your employees by demonstrating and showcasing the impact of implemented ideas and how employee actions make a difference in outcomes. Create a living timeline of ideas implemented.

Sign up for the Idea Share Tip of the Week! at Frame of Mind Consulting

Frame of Mind Consulting understands the unique DNA of your organization, which is necessary to turn any organization into one capable of leveraging the full idea potential of its employees.  Would you like to drive connectivity and ownership throughout your company?  Contact me at (860) 559-7942 to set up your complimentary consultation during which you will receive some invaluable tips that you can apply to your business right away.

3 Secrets Successful Managers Use to Drive Engagement!

Many traditional companies are reluctant to change and have no formal program to solicit and manage ideas from within the company.  This is because many people will accept change – as long as they themselves do not have to change very much. Many managers talk the talk about motivating employees – but in fact, when walking the walk, do the opposite – they demotivate them!

Management often points fingers at corporate policies as to why they can’t engage their staff.  However, we hear of that rare manager that elicits employee loyalty regardless of the overall operating environment – what is their secret? 

The first secret of a successful manager is that above all else – these managers truly care about and are invested in their staff - not just as employees, but as people with full lives and a range of interests.  They get to know them!  Furthermore, they act as a liaison between their employees and other departments to get the resources and support needed so employees can get their jobs done quickly and efficiently.  Even when it is the bottom of the ninth, with two outs and two strikes – these managers go to bat for their employees and their employees know it!

The second secret of a successful manager is that they provide a clear and credible purpose for his or her business unit that goes beyond money.  They get involved in actively coaching and refining the ideas of their people to assist their employees in achieving that purpose.  They don’t stop there – they follow up with their employees on a consistent basis and reinforce the impact their employees have within their department and the overall company. Their employees know exactly how they are contributing!

The third secret is that these managers recognize the contributions of their employees – no matter how small.  Some managers think to themselves “Why do I need to thank my employees for doing their job?” After all, they are paid to do it.  The fact is that employees in most companies are quickly criticized for their mistakes and don’t hear very much in the way of praise for the things they do right.  Therefore, I ask, “Why is preventing you as a manager and a leader from thanking your employees for doing their job?”  The bottom line is it only takes a moment of your time, motivates your employees and that is your job as a manager!

Idea Share of the Month!

When employees see that management listens to, respects and implements their ideas, they are more likely to buy into management driven change as well.

Frame of Mind Consulting understands the unique DNA of your organization, which is necessary to turn any organization into one capable of leveraging the full idea potential of its employees  Please visit Frame of Mind Consulting for more information or to sign up for Page's Idea Share Tip of the Week! 

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Does Your Leadership Create Innovation Misalignment?

Idea generation and innovation do not operate in a vacuum or with ideas flowing one way up to leadership.   Innovation must be collaborative and open to be effective.  Many companies block the very innovation they desperately need, simply because they don’t take the time to actively listen to and respond to employee ideas.

 Peggy has often been on the receiving end of sarcastic comments from her manager, Keith, regarding her ideas for improvement.  This makes her feel disrespected and angry.  She feels her ideas are too small or insignificant to make a difference. 

·       When Keith asks her for her ideas, Peggy does not feel her ideas are taken seriously.  She thinks to herself, “Why ask for my ideas if you are not going to use them – or even consider them."  Peggy then stops giving in her ideas.  Nothing she says or does is going to make a difference.  Peggy is clearly frustrated by the lack of follow-up.

·       “Did you hear the idea Peggy had to … That is a bad idea!”  We’ve all witnessed this attitude from our co-workers!  However, the key is to look deeper into the problem that Peggy was trying to solve.  She risked coming forward with her idea for a reason – and doesn’t want to feel belittled for it.  Chances are one of Peggy’s co-workers has the solution to her problem, even if Peggy doesn’t.  If the idea is unable to be used, it is important for Keith to share with Peggy why the idea is not able to be implemented. 

      It is a well-known fact in Peggy’s department, that if Keith accepts an idea, it will become the job of the idea originator - rather than a team effort.  Peggy has lots of ideas on how to make things in her department more efficient, but she knows Keith will not provide the needed level of support and resources.  So she stifles her ideas as she is already stretched to her limit. 

Peggy has become fearful of giving in ideas due to significant misalignments on how ideas are handled in her company.  Create a win-win for your company by providing the proper training (tools and methods) for all levels of staff to understand how to generate, capture, respond to and implement those valuable ideas that generate future value for your company.  A professional idea management company, such as Frame of Mind Consulting can assist you in identifying those misalignments that prevent ideas from flourishing in your company.  Give Page a call today at (860) 559-7942.

Idea Share Tip of the Month!

An ineffective employee idea system or a lack of employee ideas is a sign of deeper issues within your company culture.  If management does not support employee ideas, and secretly sabotages employees’ efforts, you must push them out of the company – no matter how good they are at their jobs.

To sign up for Page’s Idea Share Tip of the Week! Please visit Frame of Mind Consulting.

Are Your Employees Your #1 Priority?

As an idea management consultant, it’s my job to help companies create a culture where employees look forward to coming to work every day, invested in the jobs they were hired to do.  The level at which employees are invested in your company speaks volumes about your company reputation which allows you to retain your current customers and draw in new ones.  Most companies make their clients and customers their number one priority. However, those companies have it backwards. Employees should be your number one priority and here’s why: there is a direct correlation between employee investment in their jobs and customer retention. When your employees are invested in their jobs, they will have a direct and positive impact on your company’s bottom line value, as well as its ability to maximize profitability. 

This isn’t just about having great employees who care about their jobs. You want employees who are invested in their jobs to the degree that they also actively seek out opportunities to improve both their work environment, and the customer experience. It can mean the difference between having 20percent of an engine’s capacity available to get you where you’re going, or having the whole engine at your disposal to drive your initiatives forward.

Two major components of employee investment are attracting the right talent for your organization, and retaining the talent once you acquire it. Employee turnover is extremely costly. Not only in terms of dollars expended to replace employees, but also in terms of lost productivity, retraining new hires, and lost intellectual knowledge. Employee turnover becomes even more costly when an employee leaves your company and takes the intellectual knowledge they gained while working for you over to your competition where it’s used to drive their business initiatives forward.

Furthermore, employees talk. Disgruntled employees post reviews on sites such as Vault and Glassdoor. Think about the damage that’s done to your company’s reputation when they write things like, “Lack of accountability in management is leading to a discouraging environment and a steady decline in service to clients;” or “this company continually drives talented people away.”  Not only are your potential hires — people who are the right fit for your company — reading this, your potential clients are too. 

The very reputation of your company depends on your employees. They have to be your number one priority!  When your employees know they are not expendable, and that their ideas and contributions are valued, they will help you build up your company’s reputation for taking care of your customers. Your happy customers will further advocate for your brand!

Idea Share of the Month!

Commitment to an employee idea system at all levels of management is critical to successful implementation. Your employees will be scrutinizing your entire leadership team, watching them for management behaviors and signals before buying into the system themselves. When they see investment from the top down, they will be ready to jump on board too.

To sign up for Page’s Idea Share Tip of the Week! Please visit Frame of Mind Consulting. 

Employee Ideas…Creativity…Innovation…Growth!

“Making your company a great place to work by teaching your employees to leverage their great ideas and to execute them well!”

Page A. Thibault, MBA

The question begs – Why don’t people just do what brings about results?  After all, they understand the importance of being effective. Your company may suffer from low morale and disengagement and your employees may shrink from high visibility roles for fear of reprimand.   In addition, your employees may be cynical and not take risks to bring forth their knowledge and valuable ideas.  In future blogs, you will discover how to best create an environment that is conducive to driving creativity, knowledge sharing and innovation through your company’s best asset – its employees!

I customize employee idea systems that are unique to the DNA of your organization.  This simple, yet powerful process captures your employees’ most beneficial ideas, while dramatically reducing the number of ideas in the management pipeline – making employee idea generation a manageable process.

Employee Idea Management System - a simple, powerful system that allows the free flow and exchange of ideas throughout your company; customized to your unique culture and how your employees work on a day to day basis.

A ‘personal touch’ is essential to building trust between all layers of your organization from management to the front-lines. My conversational and hands on approach focuses all employees on the right results and allows employees to practice new techniques in a safe and non-judgmental environment to maximize learning.  I teach managers and employees how to work together to achieve results with mutually beneficial input and clear expectations of the idea management process, complete with a feedback loop that results in maximum buy-in from your employees.

Idea Share of the Month!

An idea system should integrate into the fabric of how your employees already work.  If the system is too complex for your employees to understand or too time-consuming – they won’t use it.  When an employee idea system integrates into how your employees already work, they are more likely to buy into and accept the change.  

To sign up for Page’s Idea Share Tip of the Week! Please visit Frame of Mind Consulting.