Creating an Engaged Environment
If you want better employee engagement, you better engage your employees.
Talking about engaging employees is easy, actually creating a truly engaged employee environment that moves beyond just surveying employees annually, now that is difficult.
In fact, according to the Gallup organization, the percentage of engaged employees has not moved 2-3 percentage points in over 18 years. But our work with clients has shown that, in fact, you can positively impact employee engagement by enabling and supporting a performance environment that actively engages employees in 5 key engagement areas.
Change – Cultivate an environment that leads change and sees possibilities in everything, not that tries to manage change and allows the status quo to dominate the culture.
Performance Management – Flip the model from managers reviewing performance to leaders that pursue performance and that coach to expectations which are set and owned by their employees.
Accountability – Develop an organization where managers aren’t responsible for holding employees more accountable but create the environment where everyone holds themselves more accountable and where negative people don’t make the workplace caustic, but the workplace is caustic to negative people.
Relationships – Engagement is all about establishing relationships.
Break down silos by creating cross functional engagement teams that leverages unique talents, not position titles, to deliver top-tier results.
Move from transactional relationships to creating more authentic relationships.
Purpose – Is everyone in the organization connected to a purpose greater than their daily work tasks? Do they know how, where, and why they are making a significant difference in the work they do?
We have seen organizations move the employee engagement needle 20-30 percentage points, not just 2-3, by truly engaging employees. If you want more information on exponentially enhancing employee engagement, then engage in a conversation with us, and even with our clients, where we partner with them to be that much needed catalyst for employee engagement success, not employee survey apathy.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Moving Performance From Compliance to Engagement
A top-down, command and control performance environment can get things done and generate success. But it often cultivates a culture of employee compliance and negatively impacts overall employee engagement. Let's take a look at the difference between a compliance-driven organization versus a purpose-driven, employee engaged performance environment and ways we can make a personal shift to greater individual and team engagement.
Compliant Behaviors
Performance is managed
Blame and justification
Task-focused
See obstacles
Waits for things to happen
Engaged Behaviors
Lead your personal performance
Seek understanding
Purpose-driven
Seek possibilities
Make things happen
Consider yourself fortunate if your organization is creating and cultivating top-tier performance through a sustained, employee engaged performance model. For those of us not so fortunate, how do we step up, lead where we are, and begin the shift from performance compliance to active engagement?
Personal Shift One - Begin by taking control of your performance and leading it by proactively setting expectations with your manager aligned to organizational purpose and vision. Once you set expectations, conduct monthly performance feedback sessions with your leader. If you don’t want your performance managed semiannually and/or annually, then engage by actively managing your personal performance and begin to reimagine performance management as performance development.
Personal Shift Two - If you see and hear blaming and justification then stop and seek understanding first, get clear and get aligned.
Personal Shift Three – Transform from task-focused delivery to purpose-driven engagement.
Personal Shift Four – Where you see obstacles and potential failure, turn it around, seek possibilities in everything, and create options and recommendations.
Personal Shift Five – Stop waiting for things to happen to you, go out and make things happen, stop playing the waiting game.
Break free of a compliant performance environment by actively engaging, leading and cultivating your own personal performance, change, relationships, and accountability. If you want better employee engagement, you better engage in your own personal performance.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
PART II: One Organization and Their Journey to Enhanced Employee Engagement
Last week we introduced a client case study of a 130-year-old oil and gas organization and their journey to enhancing employee engagement throughout the Finance and Accounting (F&A) organization. In the introductory blog we highlighted one key to more effective employee engagement was to CARE more! Clarity, Alignment, Resources and Enable. To change the current performance environment to better reflect the aspirational culture statements found displayed throughout the organization we had to establish greater clarity to an organizational purpose and align the entire F&A organization to that greater purpose.
This purpose allows people to move past “task-focused” activities to “purpose-driven” action and performance. It encourages everyone to no longer accept the status quo and to boldly challenge the future and transition from silo-ed functional teams to collaborative, connected, and highly engaged teams and individuals contributing to a common greater purpose. We have gained that clarity and alignment by creating employee-led engagement teams chartered to redefine the F&A performance environment and establishing ongoing clarity and alignment through education, connection, and relationship.
Greater employee engagement is already happening with these efforts, but this is only the foundation, the very first step. The key is sustaining and even enhancing this engagement long term. We now move to leverage the 'R' and the 'E' of CARE: Resources and Enablement. The organization is applying resources that develops every F&A leader and employee to “lead where they are”, to enable greater personal and team accountability, to lead change, not manage it, and, to empower personal and team performance. They are turning outdated performance management into the future of performance development. They do this with innovative training, coaching, reward and recognition, and engagement teams that create ongoing reinforcement activities introduced every month that ensure sustained engagement at every level. And they are rapidly moving from the task of compiling spreadsheets and the reporting of numbers to providing compelling insights from those numbers that make a positive and dynamic impact.
The organization is quickly becoming a model for gaining and sustaining employee engagement. You want better employee engagement? You better engage the employees and CARE more!
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
PART I: One Organization and Their Journey to Enhanced Employee Engagement
Last week we faced the difficult truth that most organizational stated cultures are aspirational at best and often do not reflect the true performance environment that each of us walks into each day. So, it was time to “get real” and identify whether our performance environment actually reflects our stated culture. Trust me, if there is a disconnect then it will be very difficult to enhance and sustain organization-wide employee engagement. This week we are highlighting for you one of our client’s path to enhanced engagement and their efforts to align their culture and their performance environment.
Destination Success – For this organization it was time to CARE!
They are a successful oil and gas organization located in Houston, TX that has been in existence for over 130 years, but like most companies in this industry, it is having to reimagine itself to effectively compete for the future. As part of building a new foundation of success they brought in a new CFO with a new vision for the Finance and Accounting (F&A) function.
“We want to move from completing tasks to creating a meaningful purpose. Evolve from delivering “walls of numbers” to providing great insight and impact from those numbers, and to come in each day with the intent to make each other each other great at what we do.”
The F&A organizations' previous year employee engagement scores lagged behind the rest of the organization and where the signs around the building said "We Are Bold" and “One Team,” this CFO saw an organization resigned to the status quo and would over hear statements like “We have always done it that way.” Instead of “One Team,” he experienced functional silos within the group and rather than strategically partnering with the executive and operations teams they were relegated to a back-office support, executing daily tasks and delivering those walls of numbers! Sound familiar? We find pockets of this in just about every organization!
This CFO reached out and asked us what options were available to change a 130-year-old performance environment. Our answer: You and the organization need to CARE more. You need to provide greater Clarity and Alignment to your F&A vision and the aspirational culture the organization is promoting, then we can focus on the necessary Resources to assist in the evolution, and finally determine what it will take to Enable and sustain this performance environment transformation leading to that ever illusive, greater employee engagement.
We teamed up with the CFO and his leadership team on this CARE journey, currently conducting interactive, functional team workshops designed to define what “Bold” is and is not, as well as what “One Team” means and what it will take to enable that. These sessions layout specific action plans including the formation of employee engagement teams that, from the front-line employee level, own the go forward F&A vision and which partner with leadership to redefine the performance environment. We are creating and communicating with greater Clarity and actively gaining organizational Alignment in a number of ways including the workshops and creating a next generation performance environment where every F&A employee is actively leading where they are.
Next week we will highlight the R (Resources) and E (Enable) in the CARE model and how this organization is redefining the work they do, how they do it, and most importantly, the “why” they do it, tied to a meaningful purpose, not just a task to be completed!
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Culture Vs. Performance Environment: Let's Get Real
Ok let’s be honest, how many of you work for, or in the past have worked for, an organization that defines their organizational “culture” by mission, vision, and values statements that are often prominently displayed on lobby and conference room walls and reside on corporate website home pages that tout descriptors like bold, innovative, “one team”, transparent, learning, “customer first”, passionate, and hundreds of other possible words or statements? But when you ask an employee if this is the real work environment, if their organization truly embodies these traits, their eyes roll and respond with statements like, “Yeah right.”, “Are you kidding me?”, and “Those are just words hanging on a wall.” This is when you begin to see very quickly that the actual performance environment eats culture for lunch!
So between us, let’s get real. Just recently we conducted this exercise for a client. We asked, “What is the stated culture of the organization?” and this was the list:
- Innovative
- We are One
- Bold
- Transparent
- Responsible
- Agile
All sound great and anyone would love to work in that culture. But then it got real. We then asked, “What is the performance environment people encounter each day when they come into work”? Here is that list:
- Status Quo
- Siloed
- Paralyzed
- Knowledge is power, so keep it
- Blame and justification rules
- Slow to make decisions
And senior leadership wonders why employee engagement is low to non-existent, results are marginal at best, and involuntary turnover is double digits...
I will say it again, performance environment eats culture for breakfast, lunch, and dinner! Over the next 3 weeks we are going to explore ways and highlight examples of organizations that have aligned their culture and performance environment, where employee engagement is strong, results are top tier and sustained, and where people work with purpose and passion and coming to work is both a privilege and pleasure to them.
Come back next week for our first look at these organizations!
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
The Evolution of Organizational Performance: Part Four
Part Four: The Future of Organization Performance - Now
We conclude our blog series on the evolution of organizational performance by looking at the future of performance and how we can align our actions, activities, and behaviors to stay ahead of this complicated and complex landscape of organizational performance.
Let’s first quickly recap our journey to date by listing key characteristics and positives takeaways of each era, as well as a future comparative look.
The future is not developing 1-3-5 year plans. It is about connecting and inspiring people to move and think with you, challenging the status quo, and creating an environment for fast cycle, agile, real time performance. As leaders, we can no longer depend on directing and controlling. We must enable and facilitate success and performance and finally, even though your title may not be manager, our role is to develop, cultivate and lead the environments of performance, accountability, personal/team performance, and disruptive, positive change.
Create team learning workshops, teaching them how to set expectations and review their ongoing performance with their leader each month. Cultivate a performance environment that is caustic to negative people, not where negative people make the performance environment caustic to everyone else. And finally, develop your team to lead change, think disruptively, and always challenge the status quo.
You see, the future performance evolution starts with you today….develop the leader in everyone by making a LeaderShift in you.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.