Matching Agendas

A great place to work, pays handsomely!

The Great Place to Work Institute conducts a survey each year of employees to determine the 100 best companies to work for.

Whilst the article mostly referred to international organisations, in Australia Hewitt Associates conducted a similar survey for 199 organisations in 2008. The organisations that ranked within the top 9 generated twice as much revenue and almost four times the profit.

CNN report on Employee Satisfaction

“CNN reports that 67% of people hate their jobs on account of their managers.” (Ian Mann writing in this week’s Sunday Times “Mann’s World”)

When employee satisfaction has so many ‘bottom line’ benefits, isn’t it amazing that so little is being done in this area?

Case in point; Wits Business School advertisies “short-courses for far-sighted people” but offers nothing on employee satisfaction strategies. More like short-sighted courses for the totally blind!

That’s a bit like medical school; until recently medical graduates got a total of one day’s training on nutrition in theentire five year curriculum yet the importance of nutrition has been blatantly obvious for years.

Someone’s missing the plot! Are you?

Frames of Mind and Emotional Intelligence

• Our ability to understand and relate to ourselves
• Our ability to understand and relate to others

We know this already but … a great deal of research has demonstrated that emotional states influence levels of neuropeptides in the body; little  protein-like molecules used by neurons to communicate with each other … which in turn influences brain functions, like reward, learning and memory. (read more on this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropeptide)

In a nutshell, a person’s emotional state at a given time, dictates how that person will think and act in the moment … actions affect feelings and feelings affect actions and actions affect feelings and so on. 

It’s a cycle, either positive or negative and those little neuropeptides play a significant role determining which way the game plan plays itself out; every day these invisible molecules influence the fate of individuals, families, companies and even nations.  

I am sure you know that already but how often do you put that knowledge into practice?

• How often do you take a colleague’s emotional state into account when approaching them?
• How often do you consider a person’s state when things go wrong?
• How often do you take the time to learn from a negative encounter?
• How often do you design a strategy for “next time”?

It’s all good and well to expect people to take responsibility for their emotional states but it is an effective leader who understands that human nature is what it is, and it isn’t always pretty!

The fact is that many people don’t take responsibility for their emotional states; what a person should do, in a rational state, and what they actually do are not always the same. A failure, especially by leaders, to understand this dynamic wastes huge amounts of unnecessary time, money and energy.

Effective leaders understand the importance of;

• Careful Timing: Communicating into a receptive environment or state.
• Intelligent Review: Understanding the “what, where, why and how” of past mistakes and then learning from them.

Matching Agendas, the simple art of caring, creates the receptive environment so essential for effective and productive communication between people … who do not always behave rationally.

A strong case for Matching Agendas

In a recent Harvard Business Publishing article “How to counter resistance to change” Peter Bregman writes that “70% of all corporate change fails.” 

Who is accountable for the 70% failure rate here? How is it possible that, with all the prestigious business school graduates and MBA’s, corporate leaders still don’t get the message that employees’ agendas matter? Whose not listening? 

As a business leader are you prepared to listen up and take responsibility for changing the reality within your circle of influence, not just your own organization but those with whom you interact? Read the full article here, it has Matching Agendas written all over it!

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/4059

Chicken and Egg Question answered … almost!

Does the organisation perform better because the employees are satisfied or are the employees satisfied when the organisation performs well?

Your company’s success, dare I say survivial, could well depend on your answer to this critical question.

When one observes how most organisations operate one could reasonably assume that the predominant belief expects the latter to be true; that is, if the organisation performs better the employees should be happier and thus perform better! But that isn’t really how it works in practice. 

In a paper published by Daniel Koys in December 2006 entitled “The effects of employee satisfaction, organizational citizenship behavious, and turnover on organizational effectiveness: A unit-level, longitudinal study.” he had this to say;

“Cross-lagged regression analyses show that employee attitudes and behaviors at Time 1 are related to organizational effectiveness at Time 2. Additional cross-lagged regression analyses show no significant relationship between organizational effectiveness at Time 1 and the employee attitudes and behaviors at Time 2. These results add to the evidence that HR outcomes influence business outcomes, rather than the other way around.“

What is your experience?  

You can view the abstract and purchase the research paper here:  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119928793/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

Employee satisfaction.

An employee satisfaction strategy makes good financial sense … it also makes good people sense!

I recently chatted to a labour lawyer friend of mine and asked him two questions and, although I expected the type of answers, I was very surprised at how quick he was to answer my questions.

Question 1.     How many employees in your client companies would be considered highly satisfied?     

• Answer:   5%

Question 2.    How many of your client companies have employee satisfaction as a management priority? 

• Answer:  None. Some HR managers try to get it onto the agenda but it’s an uphill battle.

When you consider the potential returns, this oversight is surely an indictment on management education. 

In a recent Sunday Times article a prominent university Business School advertised its post-graduate courses for the year … not one course addresses employee satisfaction strategies! 

Makes you think, doesn’t it? 

If employee satisfaction isn’t high on your management priorities, it surely ought to be. Talk to us, we can help.

More benefits from “engaged workers” from Gallup

In an article entitled “What if the recession endures?”, Jennifer Robinson writes the following;

Engaged workers “significantly outperform disengaged workers. Gallup research has found that organizations with more than four engaged employees for every one actively disengaged employee saw 2.6 times more growth in earnings per share than did organizations with a ratio of slightly less than one engaged worker for every one actively disengaged worker.

The research also revealed that top-quartile (in engagement) business units have

• 12% higher customer advocacy, 
• 18% higher productivity, and 
• 12% higher profitability than bottom-quartile business units. 

Bottom-quartile business units, in contrast, have;

• 51% more inventory shrinkage, 
• 31% to 51% more turnover, and 
• 62% more accidents than business units in the top quartile. 

If employee satisfaction (ergo engagement) isn’t a high management priority on your agenda, isn’t it time you reconsidered? Talk to us about how!

You can find the full article here http://gmj.gallup.com/content/117226/Recession-Endures.aspx#1

It makes sense!

An employee friendly environment makes good financial sense, it also makes good people sense!

You can’t buy my love.