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.
Destination: Success | What is Your True Potential?
Over the last two weeks we have created a foundation for leading your individual performance by creating greater personal organizational, situational, and self-awareness and established a framework on that foundation with a focus on developing your professional eligibility, suitability, and viability.
With both a firm foundation and the framework in place, our attention now turns to identifying and cultivating your potential and enhancing your professional impact and value.
Let's start with your potential. Have you ever been asked “What is your potential?” and “How do we tap into that potential?” If not, you have now! Potential is not about today’s completion of tasks but tomorrows personal and professional aspirations.
Invest time each month in defining, refining, and cultivating your potential and proactively sharing your monthly progress with your direct leader.
What is your potential?
In addition to cultivating potential, you want to continually focus on enhancing your professional impact. It is important to find opportunities that add value and impact organizationally, with your team, and personally.
Organizational Impact:
- Invest time to learn more about your industry – trends, challenges etc.
- Read articles and white papers, attend industry conferences and education sessions online
- Attend/organize internal educational sessions (lunch and learns, etc.)
Team Impact:
- Take the lead in establishing better team alignment/connections
- Each quarter take time to identify, as a team, what's working and what’s not working then create a plan for continual team improvement and engagement
Personal Impact:
- Proactively schedule 15-minute performance connections with your direct leader to review and pursue your performance plan and results
- Become a role model for leading both accountability and change
- Invest time in cultivating more authentic relationships in your personal sphere of influence
If you will invest just one hour each month to cultivate your potential and enhance your professional impact you will see where taking control and leading your personal performance will make a tremendous, positive impact on you, your team and the organization you invest so much time with.
And for more in-depth training on Leading Performance be sure to check out our all-new Lead Where You Are Passport that helps you enhance core skills around accountability, change, performance, relationships, and purpose.
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.
Destination: Success | 3-D Performance Planning
Most individual performance discussions typically focus on enhancing one key dimension, eligibility. These are your technical talents and recent accomplishments. An individual’s eligibility is extremely important, however, the discussion is missing two other critical development areas: suitability and viability. In this third part of our Leading Performance blog series, we challenge you to take a more wholistic, 3-D view of your past and future performance so your development plan can be more focused and impactful.
Download our PDF on eligibility, suitability, and viability, the framework for leading performance.
And for more in-depth training on Leading Performance be sure to check out our all-new Lead Where You Are Passport that helps you enhance core skills around accountability, change, performance, relationships, and purpose.
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.