Our View on Engagement: Making the Shift
It’s time for a shift in leadership! The old command and control management model of the past just won’t cut it anymore.
Just the podcast this week!
If you want better employee engagement, try engaging your employees. We know you will be amazed.
For more information on ELO employee engagement contact us or shoot us an email at info@cornerstonelearning.com.
For free engagement and performance resources head over to our Resource Vault!
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.
Our View on Engagement: Enabling the Performance Environment
Defining and marketing a company culture is great but enabling and sustaining an engaged performance environment is key.
Related Fun Fact of the Week:
The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) predicts that every time a business replaces a salaried employee, it costs six to nine months’ salary on average. For a manager making $60,000 a year, that’s $30,000 to $45,000 in recruiting and training expenses.
Overlooking your performance environment sure is expensive!
Defining and marketing a company culture is great, but enabling and sustaining an engaged performance environment is key.
There is a lot of talk and focus on defining and marketing an organizational culture. However, what often gets overlooked, or not discussed publicly, is the actual performance environment people walk into and experience on a daily basis. So, what is your performance environment?
Many times, we see company cultures as more aspirational than reality. We see cultures highlighted on websites and reception area walls with descriptors like:
We are: One Team, Innovative, Bold, Agile
But the reality of the performance environment that exists just past the reception area is what counts. You might hear employees say “We are siloed,” “Resigned to the status quo,” or “Slow to react.” To align a performance environment to that aspirational culture you have to be intentional. First, be honest with what is real and what is aspirational.
If we say we are an innovative culture, how are we enabling innovation to grow and thrive? Can we easily point to examples of how we are cultivating innovation throughout the organization, rewarding and recognizing it, and making it a part of every job descriptions? If we say we are one team, how many cross-functional teams are working in your organization focused on improving performance?
Unlock the potential of your organization’s talent by enabling an engaged performance environment, not marketing an aspirational culture.
If you want better employee engagement, try engaging your employees. We know you will be amazed.
For more information on ELO employee engagement contact us or send us an email to info@cornerstonelearning.com.
For free engagement and performance resources head over to our Resource Vault!
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.
Our View on Engagement: Employee-Led, Leader Supported, Organization Enabled
Our experience has shown that if you want sustained employee engagement, then you need to actively engage your employees, not just HR and or leadership in these efforts. Create an environment where employee engagement is employee led, leader supported and organizationally enabled.
Related Fun Fact of the Week:
Biosphere 2 is an American Earth system science research facility located in Oracle, Arizona. It was originally constructed between 1987 and 1991 and is a 3.14-acre structure built to be an artificial, materially closed ecological system, or vivarium. It remains the largest closed system ever created.
An excellent example of creating a sustainable environment!
If you want better employee engagement what better way than to actively engage your employees in that effort. For nearly two decades organizations have been measuring their employee engagement through annual or biannual surveys with the goal of enhancing their employee’s engagement. The unfortunate reality? Most organizations fall short in their efforts of increasing sustained, overall employee engagement.
Often turning engagement survey results into change becomes a task or project delegated to the already overburdened Human Resources organization or front-line leaders to manage and report back on how they will positively impact the engagement scores. However, enhancing employee engagement is not a task or project to be managed. Employee engagement is core to sustaining top-tier performance and creating a performance environment where talent can grow and thrive.
Our experience has shown that if you want sustained employee engagement, then you must actively engage your employees, not just HR and or leadership in these efforts. Create an environment where employee engagement is employee-led, leader supported and organizationally enabled.
Organizations enable engagement by connecting everyone to a clear organizational purpose supported by clear organizational values. Organizations enable engagement by chartering and supporting employee led teams that develop recommendations which turn engagement survey results into enhanced employee engagement.
Leaders support enhanced engagement 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, develop the environment where employees don’t just submit an annual survey and wait for something to happen. If you want sustained engagement, engage them at the very start. They can assist in promoting participation in the survey and then taking the lead in making recommendations to turn the feedback into change. We have seen incredible results when organizations intentionally enable and support employee-led engagement actions and activities.
If you want better employee engagement, try engaging your employees. We know you will be amazed.
For more information on ELO employee engagement contact us or send us an email to info@cornerstonelearning.com.
For free engagement and performance resources head over to our Resource Vault!
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.
Elevating Engagement: Elevate Your Employee Communications
We are seeing a trend in our employee engagement results in nearly every organization we survey. That trend? People want even more information on their organizations current state direction and future vision.
Related Fun Fact of the Week:
On June 1st, 1980, CNN (Cable News Network), launched the world’s first 24-hour television news network. The network signed on at 6 p.m. EST from its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, with a lead story about the attempted assassination of civil rights leader Vernon Jordan and set in motion a major change in how we all would view our news and media.
We are seeing a trend in our employee engagement results in nearly every organization we survey. That trend? People want even more information on their organizations current state direction and future vision. For years, most organizations have relied on some form of annual, semiannual and or quarterly ‘townhall” or “all employee meeting”, along with newsletters distributed periodically to update and keep the organization informed. But now, the perceived need for near instantaneous communication, the evolution of social media and the 24-hour news cycle requires a different employee connection strategy.
A key to sustained employee engagement is the ongoing connection to the organization. It is now vitally important to reimagine your communication and connection strategy and find ways to engage with employees more frequently and in the mediums they are now using to consume their information. Shooting short one to three minute, targeted videos that both inform and educate, creating and distributing weekly or monthly audio or written blogs on a variety of organizational topics, and sponsoring monthly one hour listening and brainstorming sessions where employees can engage in a small group setting with senior leadership to talk about what is and isn’t working well and brainstorming ideas for the future are just a few ideas to start your next generation connection strategy.
Letting past communication strategies and methods speak for the organization won’t work much longer. This trend is only going to continue and accelerate. What is your organization doing to elevate communications that elevate your employee engagement?
For more information on employee engagement communication contact us or send us an email to info@cornerstonelearning.com.contact us or send us an email to info@cornerstonelearning.com.
For more information about leading where you are, be sure to check out our Lead Where You Are Package!
For free engagement and performance resources head over to our Resource Vault!
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.
Elevating Engagement: Turn Your Manager Into a Great Coach!
Let’s face it, most managers are not good coaches. The leaders that are good coaches partner in developing their people to a new level of performance success, tapping into and maximizing an individuals talent potential.
Related Fun Fact of the Week:
John Wooden led his UCLA basketball team to ten basketball championships in twelve years, including seven in a row from 1967-1973! And if that wasn’t enough, four of those team finished a perfect 30-0.
Greatest coach of all time!
Let’s face it, most managers are not good coaches. The leaders that are good coaches partner in developing their people to a new level of performance success, tapping into and maximizing an individuals talent potential. Unfortunately, these coaches are rare, so it provides an opportunity to step up and lead where we are and assist our managers (and ultimately ourselves) by helping them to be great coaches.
If you want better coaching, create a comprehensive vision for your own personal growth and development to include:
Performance expectations you set with your manager, not the other way around.
Identify your unque talent strengths and developmental opportunities.
Barriers you are facing.
Performance shortfalls you might be experiencing.
Your future talent potential opportunities.
By investing this time you are not only setting in motion the right personal actions and activities to produce results, but are also providing a tremendous foundation for any manager or mentor to coach you to higher performance, assisting in eliminating identified barriers and helping to reach and maximize your talent potential.
As a next step, if you will proactively set up a 20-minute, monthly performance connection with your manager where you lead a discussion focusing on each point of your plan and your results against that plan, it creates the environment for your manager to provide ongoing coaching and not just the typical end-of-year performance review discussion with little to no focus on development. This still might not make your manager a great coach but at least you are creating the right environment for coaching and over a couple of months you will be surprised how much better both you of will get at coaching and being coached.
It’s your career, your performance now in your control.
For more information about leading where you are, be sure to check out our Lead Where You Are Package!
For free engagement and performance resources head over to our Resource Vault!
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.
Elevating Engagement: Complex and Far-Reaching
Employee engagement is complex and far reaching. So many variables can impact the engagement of an employee on a daily basis.
Related Fun Fact of the Week:
The world's tallest elevator is at AngloGold Ashanti's Mponeng Gold Mine in South Africa, which in three minutes drops an astonishing 2,283 m (7,490 ft) in a single descent – more than 4.5 times further than those in the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa. A second elevator then takes miners even lower, to 3,597 m (11,800 ft). Each day the lift ferries 4,000 workers down to the mine – 120 workers at a time in three-level steel cages, at speeds of up to 40 mph. It first operated in 1986.
After a long, hard days work, that’s what we call elevating your employees!
Quick and to the point this week. We know the profound impact that having an organization of highly engaged employees has on the bottom line. We’ve written about it here and there are hundreds of other blogs, articles and studies conducted that all tell us as much. So why is there still such a lack of engagement in most organizations?
Because creating, cultivating and, most importantly, sustaining engaged employees is just plain difficult!
Employee engagement is complex and far reaching. So many variables can impact the engagement of an employee on a daily basis. From the organizational performance environment people walk into and experience every day, to the various leadership styles that formal leaders display which impact their people on a daily basis, to the multitude of personalities and workstyle behaviors exhibited by individuals throughout any organization. Any one or all of these can positively, or negatively, impact overall engagement in any given interaction.
Download our Elevating Engagement Whitepaper to learn about the three factors for sustained employee engagement.
For free engagement and performance resources head over to our Resource Vault!
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.