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After working with many organization's on improving employee engagement with great success, we have come to one conclusion. Engagement is a by-product of an enhanced performance environment, an effective EMPLOYEE communications strategy, and a transparent, team-oriented work environment and culture. Sure, you can run employee engagement surveys, but the majority of the time these become disengagers. The surveys are run and then nothing truly gets done with the data. And yes, you can shoot out some snazzy employee PR statements that temporarily boost engagement, but it's not sustained. You need an enhanced performance environment, effective employee communications, and a team-oriented work environment to sustain it. Throw in a few pulse surveys throughout the year to help guide the needs, but let's not overload the employee's inboxes with these things.
So let's discuss enhancing performance environments and, in turn, transforming both organizational and individual performance. When we transform performance we are literally flipping the performance model for most organizations. We move away from top-down driven, compliance-oriented performance, to employee engaged performance, where the individuals are driving their own performance. This is done through what we call O-L-E Performance. That is, organization enabled, leader supported, and employee-led performance.
Organizations enable an enhanced performance environment by connecting everyone to a clear organizational purpose supported by clear organizational values. Organizations enable this by chartering and supporting employee-led teams that give the employees the power to develop recommendations that better and enhance the organization, culture, and, in the end, performance.
Leaders support an enhanced performance environment by evolving from top-down planning, directing, controlling and managing people and processes, to inspiring, enabling, facilitating and developing employee performance, accountability and change. Leaders should create and support the environments for active employee engagement and cultivate a Lead Where You Are performance environment, not attempt to manage their people and activities.
And finally, as mentioned above, in a traditional performance environment, much of the role and responsibility for ensuring performance results, conducting performance feedback, developing accountability and providing effective change management resides with formal leaders in the organization. In addition, training focused on developing core leadership skills, activities and behaviors is generally reserved for these leaders and not the general employee population. This leader-led performance model, unfortunately, limits true performance ownership and we limit the potential and impact of having everyone, no matter their title or position, lead from where they are. Develop an employee-led environment where employees don’t just submit an annual survey and wait for something to happen. If you want sustained performance, engage them at the very start. We have seen incredible results when organizations intentionally enable and support employee-led actions and activities.
OLE Performance is the key to shifting performance results from top-down driven to one that is enabled by the organization, leader supported, and owned and led by the employees. This performance transformation will lead to enhanced and sustained performance by the employees and the organization.
