THE ENGAGING LEADER.Engaged Employees–4 steps to finding your “pockets of excellence”. Employee Work Passion

THE ENGAGING LEADER.

Amazing articles from Ken Blanchard discovering some clues of engagement.

At a recent conference in Richmond, VA, I had a chance to conduct a workshop with 160 Legislative Clerks and Secretaries.  It was part of a week-long National Conference of State Legislatures.  The topic for the morning session was Creating an Engaging Work Environment. In an exercise during the session, I asked participants to remember a time when they were the most engaged in their work environments.

Participants thought back over their past and present experiences and shared with each other some of the factors that created such an engaging environment.  Factors such as meaningful work, growth opportunities, collaborative work environment, trusting and caring relationships were all mentioned.

Next we looked specifically at their present roles and work environments. Using a six point scale they evaluated their current work environment on 12 different factors that Blanchard research has identified as contributing to individual engagement and passion. (See Below).

While their scores averaged a “4” on the 6-point scale, there were also “2s” and “6s” included in that average.  This is true anytime you bring a group of people together—there is always a wide variation of scores that an average often conceals.  While an organization may score a “4” overall, the reality is that the average represents some low scores as well as pockets of excellence.

So what does a smart leader do?  Actively seek out both groups for more information.

·         You want to identify low scoresearly on so you can address them. 

·         You also want to identify pockets of excellence so that you can learn from them. 

In our work with clients, one of the biggest ways we help is by identifying these high performing pockets so that best practices can be shared with others.

4 steps to identifying your pockets of excellence

How’s your organization doing when it comes to measuring overall engagement levels?  Do you know where your pockets of excellence are operating?  If not, here’s a 4-step process to get you started.

1.    Conduct an employee engagement survey across your entire organization.  Be sure to capture responses from as many different functions, sub-units, and teams as possible.  Survey widely.

2.    Review responses and look for patterns at the team, functional, or location level.  Identify your individual pockets of disengagement and pockets of excellence.

3.    Conduct follow-up interviews—especially with your pockets of excellence.  Your goal is to find out what is contributing to high ratings.  What managerial practices or environmental factors are contributing to positive employee perceptions?

4.    Share best practices broadly across other units.  Share the practical strategies that you discover from individual teams and units with others in the organization.

Too often we think that the answer is “out there” somewhere.  The best ideas are usually closer to home.  Be sure that you are looking for them!

Employee Work Passion

What ’s important in creating a motivating work environment and whose job is it?

By Drea Zigarmi , Dobie Houson, David Witt , and Jim Diehl

There’s a lot of buzz about the factors that lead to an engaging work environment and an equal number of prescriptions for what should be done to improve it. But what factors are most important, and who is actually responsible for creating a motivating work environment in today’s organizations?

Is it an immediate manager’s responsibility? Is it senior leadership’s responsibility? What role do individual employees have in the process?

These are just some of the questions asked in a recent survey conducted by Training magazine and The Ken Blanchard Companies® as a part of Blanchard’s ongoing research into the factors that create employee work passion. More than 800 Training magazine readers participated in the survey sharing their thoughts on 4 key questions.

1.    What factors are most important when it comes to employee retention?

2.    Which of five Job factors do you feel is most important?

3.    Which of five Organizational factors do you feel is most important?

4.    Who has primary responsibility for seeing that needs get met in these areas?

What factors are most impor tant to employees when it comes to remaining with an organization—Job, Organizational, or Relationship factors?

The first question in the survey focused on what type of factors respondents felt influenced employee retention the most. Respondents were asked to rank three different categories of factors.

• Job Factors—Autonomy, Meaningful Work, Feedback, Workload Balance, and Task Variety

• Organizational Factors—Collaboration, Performance Expectations, Growth, Procedural Justice (process fairness), and Distributive Justice (rewards, pay, and benefits)

• Relationship Factors—Connectedness with Colleagues and Connectedness with Leader

 The survey found that people experience their environment first through their jobs and the role they are playing, before looking at the Organizational factors or relationship factors. In the minds of the Training magazine survey participants, the factors they found to have the most impact in terms of their intentions to stay with their organizations are the five Job factors. And while Organizational and Relationship factors are seen as a secondary aspect of the work environment, that doesn’t mean they are unimportant.

Job, Organizational, and Relationship factors come and go in primary importance as

employees’ realities shift back and forth based on their work experiences. For example, Distributive Justice often becomes more important when people look at their checks and realize they are not making as much as they would like to, while Growth might be more important on another day when people feel hemmed in and are wondering if there might be another place where they could go for better opportunities. To help people become passionately involved in their work, leaders have to make sure people are getting their needs met in all three areas.

A Deeper Look at the Relative Importance of Each Factor

Next, respondents were asked to rank the five Job factors and the five Organizational factors in terms of relative importance. While all of the factors received high marks depending on the personal experience of the respondents, there were some factors that were ranked most often as first, second, or third most important in the forced ranking.

The results depicted in Chart 2 show that organizations wanting to create an environment where people have job commitment need to ensure that their creative, talented people see their work as meaningful. Second, organizations will want to create an environment where people have Autonomy and feel able to make the decisions that influence the quality of their work instead of having leaders making most of the choices for them. Finally, and importantly, organizations will want to ensure that opportunities for Task Variety are present, meaning that an individual’s work should not be so repetitive that it does not stimulate thought and require attentiveness.

When it comes to Organizational factors, people are most frequently concerned with Procedural Justice, which refers to the fairness of the decision-making process used by the organization’s leaders. The more involved people are in their jobs, the more they feel that organizational decisions should be free from bias, consider all stakeholders, and be consistently applied to all. When people perceive that decisions are not being made in a fair manner, it drives talented people out.

Collaboration is also important in that people want to have a sense that they work in an environment where people share information within and across departments and business units. People want to work in an environment where they can collaborate with others in a way that allows them to draw from the best minds in the organization to work on a common problem.

Finally, Performance Expectations rounds out the top three Organizational factors and expresses the importance people place on wanting to know what initiatives are most important to the organization and how their individual goals contribute to those initiatives.

Who Is Responsible for Making Things Better?

The final questions in the survey asked respondents who they felt had the primary responsibility for influencing and improving each of the 12 factors. Academic literature typically sees organizational factors as being strategically determined by the senior leadership of an organization and embedded in their policies and procedures. Job factors are generally thought to be at the discretion of the leader and follower. This question was an opportunity to see how the survey respondents saw these responsibilities.

Respondents saw responsibility for Meaningful Work, Autonomy, Task Variety, and Workload Balance as a shared task between themselves and their immediate manager. Somewhat surprisingly, for the Job factors of Meaningful Work, Task Variety, and Workload Balance, employees actually saw themselves as having more responsibility than their manager. The one exception to the idea of shared responsibility was on the factor of Feedback where 82% of the respondents saw the responsibility for Feedback as primarily being in the hands of the supervisor.

As the academic literature would suggest, senior leaders were seen as being more responsible for the Organizational factors, especially for the factors of Growth and Distributive Justice. However, for Procedural Justice and Performance Expectations, respondents saw senior leadership involved but their immediate manager as primarily responsible. And for Collaboration, respondents saw themselves as the primary driver by a substantial margin.

Respondents saw the social dimensions of their organizational lives as their responsibility with 92% of the respondents seeing it as their responsibility to improve their Connectedness with their Colleagues and 75% of the respondents feeling it was their responsibility to improve relationships with their leader.

Implications for Leaders

In summary, survey respondents saw it as their primary responsibility to improve the factors of Meaningful Work, Autonomy, Workload Balance, Task Variety, Collaboration, Connectedness with Leader, and Connectedness with Colleagues.

They saw their managers as primarily responsible for improving the factors of Feedback, Procedural Justice, and Performance Expectations.

And they saw senior leadership and systems as responsible for Growth and Distributive Justice.

These results point out some important distinctions between what respondents feel that they can control personally and what they think the organization ought to be doing to help them.

For example:

• Organizations need to train leaders at all levels of the organization—including self-leaders who see themselves as most responsible for 6 of the 12 factors but who may not have the requisite skills for collaborating, communicating, managing up, influencing without authority, or managing their time or workload effectively.

• Organizations need to train their managers to understand that they are the first bastion of Procedural Justice and Feedback and if they are not living up to the expectations of followers, the direct reports will see their managers as not serving them.

• When it comes to Distributive Justice (pay, benefits, etc.) and Growth, respondents saw improvement in these areas as a senior leadership/systems responsibility. When people feel that they do not have growth opportunities, or that resources are not being distributed fairly, they are going to hold senior management responsible.

Creating Resilience, Adaptability, and Passion

If an organization wants to retain their top talentand maintain their organization’s expertise and knowledge, employees within the organization must view Job, Organization, and Relationship Factors as positive. Positive perceptions of the Job and Organizational factors increase the likelihood of an employee staying with the organization; 58% of the respondents said Job Factors were the number one consideration, while 25% said Organizational Factors were number one.

But retaining top talent is only half the battle. Other behaviors, such as the use of

discretionary effort, altruism, and the positive endorsement of the organization and its leadership are also important.

Blanchard research reveals that employees are constantly making appraisals of their work experiences and these appraisals result in intentions to stay, to use discretionary effort, to perform at a higher than average level, and to endorse the organization and its leadership.

These intentions stem from the sense of well-being created by the employee’s organizational experience with all of the 12 Employee Work Passion Factors.

Organizations need people to be unselfish, altruistic, and good sports amid the craziness of organizational life. As an organization is buffeted by the needs of profitability, change, or regulation, it is essential to have employees who recognize that while it is not always perfect, the organization is a pretty good place in general. All organizations have warts and imperfections, and leaders need employees with a certain sense of tolerance for the imperfections that might be happening.

Leaders have always felt a responsibility to retain top talent who are resilient, adaptable, and passionate about their work and their organization. But a startling aspect of this research is the extent to which employees see themselves as being responsible for improving their work environments rather than solely as their manager’s role. Leaders can use this survey data to see creating a motivating work environment as a partnership between themselves and their direct reports where everyone feels they can own and take responsibility for their experience within the organization.