The TrueInsider.com Blog

Time to Start Monitoring Employee Engagement

trueinsider — Fri, 21 May 2010 16:37:07 +0000

Companies need to begin monitoring employee engagement. Recent research by Caburn Hope revealed that a mere 59 percent of companies carry out annual surveys to determine their current level of employee engagement. 78% of employer respondents in the online poll confirmed they have conducted some form of Employee Engagement survey, which means that 22% still don’t see any importance in employee feedback and engagement.

Caburn also points out that research by the Corporate Leadership Council has determined that a 10% rise in employee engagement yields minimally a 6% productivity increase. Employee engagement directly affects the bottom line – it’s time to start measuring it.

What Makes An Engaging Leader?

trueinsider — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 19:47:31 +0000

An excellent post by Mark Hirschfeld details the differences between an engaging leader and one that makes you want to check your Facebook wall every 5 minutes.

Hirschfeld identifies seven key characteristics of engaging leaders. These leaders do the following:

1.      Use their personal power to engage and are committed to creating a great workplace,
2.      Inspire confidence in their decisions and direction,
3.      Build trust through their honesty and integrity,
4.      Practice open, two-way communication,
5.      Shun the temptations of executive greed and strive to pay fairly,
6.      Genuinely value employees as people, and
7.      Lead with respect, not coercion, control, fear, or intimidation.

It is important that leaders everywhere incorporate these themes into their leadership style. Communication, respect, valuing employees – these are all achievable leadership qualities. But they will take practice, effort, and focus. In order for leaders to start making strides, they must first realize that employee engagement provides significant ROI through productivity and retention.

Hirschfeld goes on to propose that leaders ask themselves the following questions:

How do you believe your employees view you (in regards to the seven themes of engaging leadership)?
Do they see you as someone who puts self-interest ahead of the greater good of the firm?
Are you providing a clear picture of where the organization is going, and helping employees see their role in that picture?
Do employees where you work believe they have an opportunity to truly be heard, that their opinions are given due consideration?
Are you seen as a leader who inspires confidence, commitment and extra effort?

Employers who cannot answer Hirschfeld’s questions affirmatively should immediately alter their leadership style and deploy meaningful employee engagement solutions.

Tips On Using Social Media to Improve Employee Engagement

trueinsider — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 07:30:54 +0000

Martha Finney wrote a fantastic Smart Blog post on how to properly use social media to enhance engagement in the workplace. Here’s a summary of her key tips on using social media in the workplace:

Know exactly what kind of culture you want to create inside your company.
Draw up a terms-of-use policy.
Don’t punish your people for speaking their minds.
Limit the layers between the CEO and the “publish” button.
Keep your promises.
Don’t spy.

Two of these tips really stand out to me.

Don’t punish your people for speaking their minds. This is an issue in corporations, as punishing people for speaking their minds is a fast way to thwart innovation and productivity. Encourage your employees to communicate openly – this will help solve problems more efficiently. Employees will not hold on to frustrations if they are allowed to communicate their concerns.

Don’t spy. If you act like big brother, you will only exacerbate the problem. Monitor your brand online, but beware of punishing people for any little comment they make about their workday. You will probably make things worse if you take on the spying role. Employees are simply moving after hours conversations to the web, and this is actually going to happen more and more. The key is to engage with them and have a two-way dialogue.

Social tools can improve corporate culture, and will make employees more productive. Use Martha’s tips to allow these tools to open the lines of communication at work and improve employee engagement.

Employee communication networks will improve company performance

trueinsider — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 01:37:53 +0000

Investing time and resources into improving employee communication tools will impact the bottom line – in a good way! New research from the University of Queensland suggests that large companies will see significant gains in productivity by investing in their internal communication networks.

The analysis of internal networks was performed by University of Queensland Business School experts, Dr Tim Kastelle and Dr John Steen. They advised companies to invest in their networks and pay attention to how they are functioning.

“Network analysis finds links between the structure of firms and their performance in the areas of innovation and strategy, which are critical to their long term growth,” Dr. Steen said.

Click here for the full article from The University of Queensland.

Corporate culture a matter of life and death?

trueinsider — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:00:28 +0000

Shortly after the recent safety problems at Toyota came to light, the Wall Street Journal published an essay by an author who contended that Toyota’s inadequate response was partially the result of deeply-ingrained aspects of Japanese corporate culture. Japanese companies pride themselves on making products that are superior in quality to anything else on the market. The failure by these companies to be prompt and forthright in public disclosures relating to safety issues, the author asserted, stems partially from the shame felt in admitting that their products do not meet the high standards that consumers have come to expect.

The author suggested that another aspect of Japanese corporate culture also contributed to Toyota’s difficulties:

“There is also a culture of deference inside corporations that makes it hard for those lower in the hierarchy to question their superiors or inform them about problems. The focus on consensus and group is an asset in building teamwork, but also can make it hard to challenge what has been decided or designed.”

All of this doesn’t just sound like part of Japanese corporate culture, but part of the culture in hierarchical organizations everywhere. Not wanting to admit mistakes is part of human nature. Not wanting to acknowledge a failure of duty and responsibility is an innate survival instinct. By the same token, how many senior managers really want to hear that the chosen course of action has flaws, especially from those working under them? Not all organizations explicitly invite the kind of feedback that will result in improvements, and not inviting it often sends a message in and of itself: we’ll let you know when we want to hear it, otherwise don’t bother.

This isn’t to say there aren’t companies out there that foster the kind of open culture that encourages honest criticism and feedback. There are a lot of them, though still not enough. What’s important is that employees feel safe in offering this feedback, whether because the organizational culture embraces an open sharing of ideas or because companies institute effective mechanisms for gathering and then responding to anonymous feedback. Employees need the ability to speak up about issues and problems that are important to them. In certain cases, as we saw with Toyota, sometimes lives depend on it.

Zappos.com Founder Used Employee Ideas to Create Company Culture

trueinsider — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:15:41 +0000

In a recent New York Times interview, Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos.com, gave some insight into how he built the Zappos company culture. Tony sold his first company, LinkExchange, to Microsoft in 1998 for $265 million. Why did he sell the company? Sure, he made a boatload of money on the deal. But what actually pushed him to sell was LinkExchange’s depressing company culture. Tony had reached the point where he dreaded getting out of bed in the morning – the snooze button could only be hit so many times before had to leave for work.

With his newfound wealth, Tony decided to take a different approach when founding Zappos one year later. He decided to form a culture where employees were actually excited to go into the office.

“I wanted to make sure that I didn’t make the same mistake that I had made at LinkExchange, in terms of the company culture going downhill. So for us, at Zappos, we really view culture as our No. 1 priority. We decided that if we get the culture right, most of the stuff, like building a brand around delivering the very best customer service, will just take care of itself.”

Tony’s first step in creating the incredible Zappos company culture was to form a list of 10 core values. He then determined that recruits would go through two sets of interviews. The first set was with the hiring manager and his or her team to determine relevant experience and technical ability – these are the interviews that 99% of companies do. The second set was done solely by the H.R. department with a focus on determining culture fit.

And what did Tony cite as the most important thing he did to reinforce and build the Zappos culture? He said it was encouraging his employees to come up with their own ideas on how to improve the culture.

“I think of myself less as a leader, and more of being almost an architect of an environment that enables employees to come up with their own ideas…”

Referring to company culture, Tony says, “The actual ideas that I’ve personally come up with are few and far between.”

Hopefully with the assistance of enterprise 2.0 technologies, more leaders will take an active role in fostering innovative, collaborative, and enjoyable cultures. Soliciting employee ideas about improving culture leads to a more engaged workforce; the culture is more significant to employees when it becomes something they took part in creating.

The Enterprise 2.0 Pitch

trueinsider — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:03:39 +0000

All this talk about Enterprise 2.0 has some employers scratching their heads and asking, “How can Enterprise 2.0 help my company? What problem does Enterprise 2.0 solve?”

A recent post on Tech IT Easy details five elevator pitches for Enterprise 2.0 adoption. Each elevator pitch caters to a different employee in the company; in this post we will discuss the CEO pitch and the Head of HR pitch.

The CEO Enterprise 2.0 elevator pitch is focused on improving innovation and productivity. When a company wants to improve a product, develop new strategies, cut costs, or improve culture, collaborative innovation communities are an excellent solution. The pitch: “Would you rank amongst the 65% of the executive disappointed with the level of innovation in their company?”

The Head of HR elevator pitch should emphasize improving employee morale and engagement. Employee job satisfaction is at record lows, which could translate to unproductive employees who “check out” mentally. Fostering a collaborative, innovate, empowering culture is an excellent solution to these problems. The pitch: “Hey I’ve heard that about 40 % of the workforce are either disengaged or disenchanted. What are we doing in our company about that?”

We recommend including an additional benefit in the pitch to HR executives and the CEO: a reduction of employee turnover. Companies may currently boast low turnover rates, but according to a recent survey by Right Management, 60% of workers say they intend to leave their jobs when the economy improves. Lowering employee turnover will result in substantial recruitment cost savings over the next few years. Executives list ROI as one of their main concerns regarding Enterprise 2.0 technologies; a reduction in employee turnover is an excellent example of potential financial benefits from an Enterprise 2.0 roll out.

Best Companies to Work For

trueinsider — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:35:31 +0000

Fortune’s list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For was released Thursday morning, with SAS Company leading the way. SAS, based in North Carolina, gives employees an impressive array of benefits: subsidized child care, unlimited sick days, a free medical center staffed by four physicians, and a 66,000-square-foot fitness center. It’s no wonder SAS boasts an incredibly low turnover rate of two percent.

Jenn Mann, Vice President of Human Resources at SAS, said the following:

“In a tough economy, SAS did not waiver from our commitment to our employees and the innovative culture that keeps them challenged and provides work-life balance. SAS’ continued success proves our core belief: Happy, healthy employees are more productive.”

The Top 25 on Fortune’s List:
1 SAS
2 Edward Jones
3 Wegmans Food Markets
4 Google
5 Nugget Market
6 DreamWorks Animation SKG
7 NetApp
8 Boston Consulting Group
9 Qualcomm
10 Camden Property Trust
11 Robert W. Baird & Co.
12 Bingham McCutchen
13 W. L. Gore & Associates
14 Recreational Equipment
15 Zappos.com
16 Cisco
17 Methodist Hospital System
18 Whole Foods Market
19 Genentech
20 Devon Energy
21 NuStar Energy
22 Johnson Financial Group
23 Umpqua Bank
24 Goldman Sachs Group
25 Novo Nordisk

Afraid to Speak Up

trueinsider — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 00:57:50 +0000

Most of us have experienced a time when we wanted to share honest feedback with our superiors at work but for one reason or another couldn’t bring ourselves to say anything. There’s been a fair amount of research done on why people don’t speak up at work. And it won’t come as any revelation that the number one reason employees hesitate to give feedback is fear.

Amy Edmondson (Harvard Business School), a prominent researcher in this area, noted in a 2006 interview that she hadn’t yet “worked with an organization that has fully transformed itself from one of fear to one in which most employees would rate the organization as open or conducive to speaking up.” Granted, Edmondson’s research focused on large multinationals. And many companies have made significant strides in fostering a culture of openness since that time. Still, those in the trenches at the vast majority of medium-sized and large organizations subscribe to the following belief: in most contexts, speaking up at work about things you think could be improved is more likely to hurt your career than help it.

One of the purposes of TrueInsider is to give co-workers a forum for exchanging ideas and feedback with each other and with management – a safe place where they won’t have to worry so much about whether their well-intentioned suggestions will hurt their chances for the next promotion. Along the way, companies will hopefully begin the process of rethinking their feedback mechanisms and make changes that will take some of the fear out of sharing ideas with management.

Job Satisfaction Hits New Low

trueinsider — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 18:39:47 +0000

Do you plan on leaving your job? According to a new survey from The Conference Board, job satisfaction has hit its lowest level in 22 years, and 22% of employees plan on leaving their current job within the year.

According to the report, only 45 percent of the 5,000 respondents said they are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61 percent in 1987. Job satisfaction is down across all age groups and income levels, but the biggest declines are in the under-25 and the over-65 groups.

“Fewer Americans are satisfied with all aspects of their employment, and no age or income group is immune. ‘Challenging and meaningful work is vitally important to engaging American workers,’ adds John Gibbons. ‘Widespread job dissatisfaction negatively affects employee behavior and retention, which can impact enterprise-level success.’ “

So how do we engage these employees in this new era of social media? What is “challenging and meaningful” to them? Employees need an outlet to give feedback about their organization. Why? Because many employees feel powerless to improve their company. The company-employee relationship seldom involves communication about what is really going on. It is often one-sided communication – the company is talking to the employee but not listening to the employee’s ideas and suggestions. People are rarely satisfied with any relationship, personal or professional, that doesn’t allow for candid communication.

TrueInsider is working on some modern ways of engaging employees in this new age of social media. Contact us at info@trueinsider.com to find out more about what’s next.