5 Ways to Improve Employee Engagement

Employee engagement doesn’t come from a suggestion box. Employee engagement is a workplace approach resulting in the right conditions for all members of an organization to give of their best each day, committed to their organization’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organizational success, with an enhanced sense of their own well-being. Engaging employees is the process of enabling them to think, behave, act, react and control their work in more autonomous ways, as to be in control of one’s own destiny.

Engagement may not be a new concept to you, but many organizations experience problems because they don’t know how to ‘live it’. Most corporations, however, fail to recognize and empower their most important assets: employees. Engagement in the workplace is an often-misunderstood concept. Employee engagement is a term that many managers and organizations think they understand, but few actually do, and even fewer really put into practice.

Here are 5 ways that you can improve employee engagement in your organization:

1.     Encourage open communication

You can get insight into what things are important to the employee by using surveys, suggestion boxes and team meetings. Be open-minded and encourage them to express their ideas and perspectives without criticism. This means putting into practice everything you have learned about effective listening. Address their concerns in the best way you can.

2.     Support employees in their work and growth

How many of you have responded to a subordinate’s idea as brilliant or even good. Success begets success. You can support employee growth by providing education and learning opportunities, cross training, coaching, and any other interactions that support employees’ personal development.

3.     Collaborate and share on problem-solving

When employees get the idea that their manager or leader is the one who has to solve all the problems, it takes away from their sense of empowerment, and ultimately is likely to decrease engagement over time. Encourage team members to take responsibility, and work through problems or issues on their own, or collaboratively. It’s not the manager’s job to fix everyone else’s problems.

4.     Share More, Not Less.

Even in a small company, silos emerge. A policy of more sharing will help everyone stay in touch with what others are doing, and create a collective expectation. Keeping everyone pointed in the same direction is hard; sharing more about what’s going on, how you’re doing things, reasoning behind decisions, etc. will help.

5.     Culture of Continuous Learning:

Last but not the least is culture of continuous learning. Companies with higher number of knowledge workers grow at much higher pace as compared to competition and their growth is mostly sustainable. Training programs, workshops, brainstorming sessions, and focus group discussions can help employees improve their knowledge. In addition, this process provides peer-to-peer learning opportunities that result in improved performance.

Employee involvement cultivates an atmosphere of collaboration, increases retention of talented staff, and intensifies dedication and commitment. Employees develop a sense of ownership over proposed changes when they are involved.  Employee engagement can not only make a real difference, it can set the great organizations apart from the merely good ones.

Empowering employees is the ongoing process of providing the tools, training, resources; encouragement and motivation your workers need to perform at the optimum level. If your organization is looking for a way to speed processes and still produce quality materials and services, focus on employee empowerment. When you show an employee you trust them, and give them timely information and the authority to find solutions, they will be able to solve problems and provide solutions more rapidly than someone without that empowerment.

Engagement for the sake of engagement is just that. Happy employees are good, but happy employees that contribute to the business by performing in exceptional ways are better. It’s also critical to remind employees and management that engagement is a two way street – the company will do great things for employees and employees will do great things for the company. Very few companies get this right, but those that do create a virtuous cycle of employee engagement where the company does more for its people and the people do more for the company which in turn causes the company to do even more for its people.

What other advice would you suggest? How do you get engagement in your company?

5 Reasons Why Suggestion Boxes Fail

Many organizations want to harness the ideas for improvement that naturally exist in their employees. Suggestion boxes are a common, but ineffective, way to engage employees in continuous improvement. They’re usually implemented with the best of intentions by managers who genuinely want to hear their employees’ improvement ideas, but the boxes fail to produce the desired engagement. Most of the reasons suggestion boxes, or any idea collection process, do not work effectively come down to a combination of process, culture and communication related issues. If you’ve tried to implement a suggestion box system in your organization before, it likely failed due to one of these reasons:

1. Lack of Follow-up
If employees feel you’re not going to seriously consider or implement their ideas, they are unlikely to participate actively. Not only will your employees be unhappy with the organization’s apparent lack of follow up, but this will likely decrease overall employee morale. Employees aren’t going to exert discretionary effort sharing improvement ideas, if they don’t know what happens to them.

2. No Recognition and Reward
A great way to increase employee engagement in continuous improvement is to recognize people for their involvement. Employee recognition doesn’t need to be anything big or fancy - a pat on the back or a high five is enough to encourage the participating employee and promote the engagement of others. Suggestion boxes make this difficult, though, since there’s no public acknowledgement for submitted or implemented improvements.

3. Too Hard to Submit Ideas
Imagine this scenario. You’re a busy front line worker, running around all day trying to get your work done. You have an idea for a way that would improve your. Do you a) Stop working, write it on a slip of paper, run across the department, and drop it in a box, or b) Implement it in your own work... if you remember... maybe. If you’re like most people, you don’t go out of your way to submit ideas that likely won’t be followed up on anyway. If no one is submitting ideas into your suggestion box, your system is failing.

4. Hard to Share Improvements
The best way to spread continuous improvement in an organization is to broadcast improvements. Announcing the impact and recognizing the person who made the improvement encourages others to get involved, and sharing new best practices expands the reach of each idea. With a suggestion box, leaders have to take the time to notify all of the right people about new improvements. Busy managers don’t often take the time to reach out to individuals like that, so the improvements don’t spread.  

5. Doesn’t Promote Engagement
There are several ways to promote the engagement of employees in continuous improvement, including to recognize and reward those who have participated already, broadcast improvements to share best practices, increasing visibility into improvement work to identify high- and under-performing areas, responding quickly to employee engagement, to name a few. Suggestion boxes certainly don’t help with any of these behaviors - and often, they directly interfere with them. Good luck spreading continuous improvement with a stagnant box on the wall.

Suggestion boxes are a bad way to approach a great concept, and the desire to engage employees in continuous improvement shouldn’t be abandoned because that method failed. Instead, I’d encourage you to look into real employee engagement.

The pitfalls of an ill-conceived employee suggestion program are multiple, legendary and most frequently - avoidable. With organizational commitment, clarity and ongoing communication employee engagement can positively impact your bottom line and your employee motivation and enthusiasm.

Lean Quote: Quality is Not Just a System, It is a Culture.

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"Quality is not just a system. It is a culture." — Haim Berman 

Corporate culture, safety culture, quality culture, lean culture, … We talk about culture all the time but what is it?

Culture is the environment in which you work all of the time. Culture is a powerful element that shapes your work enjoyment, your work relationships, and your work processes. But, culture is something that you cannot actually see, except through its physical manifestations in your work place.

Culture is like personality. In a person, the personality is made up of the values, beliefs, underlying assumptions, interests, experiences, upbringing, and habits that create a person's behavior.

Culture is made up of the values, beliefs, underlying assumptions, attitudes, and behaviors shared by a group of people. Culture is the behavior that results when a group arrives at a set of - generally unspoken and unwritten - rules for working together.

In a healthy business culture, what's good for the company and for customers comes together and becomes the driving force behind what everyone does. Culture determines what is acceptable or unacceptable, important or unimportant, right or wrong, workable or unworkable. It encompasses all learned and shared, explicit or tacit, assumptions, beliefs, knowledge, norms, and values, as well as attitudes, behavior, dress, and language.

An organizations culture shown in

(1) the ways the organization conducts its business, treats its employees, customers, and the wider community,

(2) the extent to which freedom is allowed in decision making, developing new ideas, and personal expression,

(3) how power and information flow through its hierarchy, and

(4) how committed employees are towards collective objectives.

Company culture is important because it can make or break your company. Companies with an adaptive culture that is aligned to their business goals routinely outperform their competitors.

It affects the organization's productivity and performance, and provides guidelines on customer care and service, product quality and safety, attendance and punctuality, and concern for the environment. It also extends to production-methods, marketing and advertising practices, and to new product creation. Organizational culture is unique for every organization and one of the hardest things to change.

 

Building a Fit Organization

There have been countless literary volumes written about Lean (I know I have read a lot of them) but alas organizations still fail to be excellent. Too many business leaders see process improvement as a mere project, something separate from the more “pressing” goals of profits and growth. That is where they go wrong. And that’s where Building the Fit Organization comes in.

My friend and Shingo Prize winning author, Dan Markovitz, has done it again with a new practical, hands-on guide to making Lean intrinsic to your company. If you read his previous book (A Factory of One), you will already know that Markovitz is an expert in Lean principles, but here he shows how those fundamental principles work in action.

Building the Fit Organization is a must read for any business leader who wants to achieve sustainable operational excellence. Markovitz presents a very readable book that provides simple and compelling advice on transforming an organization. By comparing a fit organization to athletes, he demystifies why organizations so often fail at process improvement initiatives, and presents useful tips for building operational excellence into the core DNA of a company culture. 

Rather than trying to copy Toyota, and failing leaders must learn from it, “learn how to convert their flabby organizations into ‘fit’ ones. Markovitz distills lean management into six principles, devoting a chapter to each, for getting fit:

1. Making an unshakeable commitment to
2. Increase value provided by
3. Doing the right work (things that deliver value to the customer)
4. In the right way (through standard work)
5. With continuous monitoring of processes (through visual management systems)
6. And structured coaching for everyone (using the scientific method).

Throughout the book Markovitz, makes these principles more understandable with an analogy many can relate to of physical fitness and athletic excellence. He draws parallels between the critical principles for business “fitness” and the principles of physical fitness – because the same concepts that make for a fit person make for a fit company. The result is a refreshing, easy-to-read, 193-page books free of Japanese terms and business jargon,

Markovitz uses a number of case studies to illustrate the principles with real world examples.  These companies show what can be possible (results) when implementing the principles of a fitter organization. 

And at the end of each chapter, he includes a “Monday Morning To-Do List” with practical steps for applying each principle. Appendix 1 provides a simple thought provoking self-assessment on how you and your company currently use or don‘t use the six principles. Appendix 2 offers a list of books to dig deeper into tools corresponding to each principles, now that you understand them better.

Whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or a five-person organization, you can embark on this fitness program. Implementing these principles will set you on the road to organizational excellence (fitness). What are you waiting for start getting “fit” today.

Lean Quote: Foster Innovation Amongst Our Employees

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"Limitations live only in our minds. But if we use our imagination, our possibilities become limitless." — Jamie Paolinetti 

Innovation can be a company’s best strategic advance, especially in today’s competitive and crowded marketplace. However, for the innovation to occur, most companies have to be willing to embrace the risk of potential failure. Employees may be afraid to offer insight and new ways of doing things because the company culture doesn't support them. If you really want to empower employees, you'll need to create a company culture that encourages and rewards innovation. You may start by asking individuals to look for ways to improve efficiency, output, safety, etc. in the tasks they perform every day. Actually, this kind of an approach across the company always has to start with the tone at the top – if employees see their manager taking risks and testing new ideas, they are more likely to follow suit.

Foster innovation by challenging assumptions about what can and cannot be done. When employees come to you with an idea or a solution to a problem they believe is for the betterment of the company, it’s a sign that they care. Supporting new ideas and giving an individual the chance to ‘run with it’ is motivating, whether or not it works out in the end.

React to mistakes and failures in a way that shows that you condone risk-taking. Give your support, provide resources, and remove barriers to change. Approach problems as learning opportunities. Think twice when people agree with you; show you value independent thinking and reward people who challenge you.

As ideas cannot be shared without honest and open communication, encourage your employees to say a thing or two about company’s latest projects. Communication always takes time, so adequate time and place for discussion and meetings must be apportioned into the normal schedule.

 

Lean Tips Edition #92 (1381-1395)

For my Facebook fans you already know about this great feature. But for those of you that are not connected to A Lean Journey on Facebook or Twitter I post daily a feature I call Lean Tips.  It is meant to be advice, things I learned from experience, and some knowledge tidbits about Lean to help you along your journey.  Another great reason to like A Lean Journey on Facebook.

Click this link for A Lean Journey's Facebook Page Notes Feed.

Here is the next addition of tips from the Facebook page:

Lean Tip #1381 - Continue to Educate and Improve Yourself.
Great leaders demonstrate effective leadership skills, but most importantly, continue to improve themselves in every possible way. The person who thinks he is an expert, has a lot more to learn. Never stop learning. Be receptive to everyone’s perceptions and information from around the world and beyond. Always grow and learn.

Lean Tip #1382 - Set Definitive Goals and Follow Concrete Action Plans.
You have to know where your destination is before you can map out a plan to get there. To improve your leadership skills, first set specific life goals with appropriate timelines. Design your goals by moving backwards from the end of your life to the present week. Then, formulate action plans you can commit to that will get you to where you want to be.

Lean Tip #1383- Make Your Team’s Job Easier, Not Harder.
If you want to maintain good morale and a positive outlook among your staff, be wary of criticizing and controlling their efforts too much. It’s better to support their creative processes—provide them with the tools necessary and help “sell” their work to other departments, if that is needed.

This all serves to remove as many hurdles from their progress as possible, helping them to achieve their goals as fast as possible. It also enhances their confidence, knowing that their manager or superior is behind them and their ideas.

Try to be their advocate in the organization—you have the tools to make their work easier so that they can focus on the project at hand and not worry too much about structural obstacles and issues.

Lean Tip #1384 - Acknowledge Good Work
Don’t be one of these bosses who only provides feedback when you’ve got something to criticize! By providing your staff with positive feedback it will help to build their confidence and encourage them to get more involved in the future, so it’s vital that you acknowledge their achievements and the effort that they are putting in. Encourage creativity and ensure that everyone is clear about what is expected of them.

Lean Tip #1385 - Challenge Thinking and Assumptions. 
Don’t give all the answers to your direct report. Question their current constraints and help them explore new possibilities or new behaviors. Try asking questions such as, How could you look at the situation in a different way? What would happen if you made a change? What other alternatives can you think of?

Lean Tip #1386 –Share Information and Numbers
Let them in on what is going on within the company as well as how their jobs contribute to the big picture. When you keep you employees informed they tend to feel a greater sense of worth. Keep communication hopeful and truthful – do not be afraid to share bad news, instead be more strategic about how you deliver it. Improve performance through transparency – By sharing numbers with employees, you can increase employees’ sense of ownership.

Lean Tip #1387 - Collaborate and Share on Problem-solving
When employees get the idea that their manager or leader is the one who has to solve all the problems, it takes away from their sense of empowerment, and ultimately is likely to decrease engagement over time. Encourage team members to take responsibility, and work through problems or issues on their own, or collaboratively. It’s not the manager’s job to fix everyone else’s problems.

Lean Tip #1388 - Remove Roadblocks that Hinder Achievement
The employees should be given ample attention, and their performance should be monitored from time to time so that the management can identify the issues that the employees are facing in relation to their tasks. This activity will strengthen the internal communication between the employees and the management, which eventually will lead to development of employee skills and will improve their engagement at work.

Lean Tip #1389 - Streamline Workflow. 
Overly-complicated processes, confusing approval procedures, and slow decision-making and communication can really add up and can lead to worker burnout. Leaders should be critical of your current systems: “it’s always been done that way” is not a good enough reason to keep people miserable. Engage your people in eliminating waste, reducing complexity, and streamlining their work. They are closest to the action; get them involved in making their work better, more enjoyable and more effective.

Lean Tip #1390 - Foster a Culture of Gratitude: Recognize Your People. 
In every organization and on every team, all employees have an innate desire to feel appreciated and valued by others – their peers and their leadership. In other words: most employees want to do good work, but most employees want to be noticed for doing good work. Celebrate their accomplishments. Reward and recognize their performance. Sometimes, just say “thank you.” It will reinforce the behaviors and outcomes you want more of, and it will build goodwill with your people – it shows that you noticed and that you care. And it doesn’t have to be cash; in fact, oftentimes the most effective recognition has nothing to do with cash rewards.

Lean Tip #1391 - Hold a Weekly All-Hands Meeting.
By having weekly meetings centered on transparency, you are setting the tone for your company. And by sharing important information to the company in such a candid way, you will promote individuals to do the same.  If you have questions, ask them. If you are not clear about how your goals align to the priorities, ask your manager. Are you contributing to our metrics in a meaningful way or do you have other ideas?

Lean Tip #1392 - Give Your Employees A Suggestion System.
As a leader you need to get as much feedback as possible whether it come in directly or indirectly. It is one thing to ask for feedback, it is another to act on it. Keep in mind, if you are going to encourage and implement a mechanism that asks for feedback, you need to be equally enthusiastic when it comes to embrace that feedback and put a plan in place to act on common themes and trends that emerge.

Lean Tip #1393 - Help People Understand the True Financial Impact of Decisions. 
Get comfortable framing all major decisions in economic terms. If a manager wants to spend money on something – a new piece of equipment, a new employee, a salary increase – she needs to be prepared to explain in financial terms how it will pay off for the company. Employees, too, need to understand the real cost of mistakes or lapses in productivity as well as the potential positive impact of doing things in a new way.

Lean Tip #1394 - Put Mechanisms in Pace for Communicating Vital Issues to Frontline Employees. 
People aren't going to pick up on what leaders want them to know by osmosis. You need to tell them clearly, succinctly, and often. That means putting in place a system, or a series of systems, to ensure that the transparency value gets translated into action.

Lean Tip #1395 - Increase Dialogue With Everyone Involved.
Starting and maintaining a dialogue with people you work with builds trust. It involves a mindful exchange without preconceived agendas. Dialogue is a way of hearing and contributing to a collective wisdom without judgment, a need to win, or a desire to believe you have the answer. In some ways, it’s about thinking together and, in doing so, opening oneself to new possibilities and new voices.