Friday, March 11, 2011

Observational Engagement

How do you know if someone is engaged?

During a training session I can tell if someone is engaged in the learning by whether they:

  • Participate in the conversation
  • Make eye contact
  • Cooperate with their peers in the class
  • Have a good attitude

My hope generally is to hold 80% of the participant’s attention throughout 90% of the session.

While training can be one factor in increasing employee engagement in an organization, I was curious about the results of that increased engagement. Here is what I found.

Increased employee engagement will:

  • Increase net income growth rates by 17.5%
  • Increase employee productivity by 38%
  • Increase profitability by 27%

And…

  • Low engagement teams have an error rate 100 times more than a highly engaged team
  • Highly engaged sales representatives have 8.8% higher sales
  • Highly engaged teams on average have 40% less absenteeism
  • Moving an employee from moderately engaged to highly engaged makes them twice as likely to stay

Another study noted that fewer than 60 percent of employees are partially or fully engaged in their jobs. So what does this mean? Here are a couple of tips:

  • Managers should clearly make known to staff what is in it for them if they succeed and excel
  • Managers and senior leaders must inspire and motivate employees to keep them engaged

Employees in the United States and other parts of the world say the primary driver for engagement is the belief that an organization's leaders are truly looking out for them. However, only about 40 percent of the respondents felt this way about their own employers, while more than 50 percent said their bosses treat them "as just another part of the organization to be managed."

What are the creative ways that you inspire engagement among your team?


Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Rumpelstiltskin's Lessons

For some reason, I've been thinking about Rumpelstiltskin. You know the story: A miller wants to curry favor with a king so he unwisely claims his daughter can spin straw into gold. The king's greedy, so he locks up the daughter with a bunch of straw and a spinning wheel and tells her to produce gold every morning for three days or she dies. Hearing her despair, a gnome-like creature appears for the first two nights and successfully does the spinning in exchange for her jewelry.

However, by the last night she's out of jewelry so she promises her first-born child as payment and the gnome spins the straw into gold yet again. The king, astounded at her success, marries her. Upon the birth of her first child, the gnome appears to collect his fee. To save her child, the new queen has to correctly guess the gnome's name, the not-so-simple "Rumpelstiltskin." Through subterfuge and guile, she discovers it and all is well (except, presumably, if the king wants more gold).

Like many fable and fairy tales, Rumpelstiltskin is embedded with good lessons that can be applied to service businesses. Here are some that come to my mind:
  • Alchemy of some sort is always in demand.
  • Know who you're dealing with
  • Under-promise and over-deliver, not the other way around.
  • Unrealistic promises may come back to bite you.
  • It's the age of the Internet and it's a double-edged sword: your name is out there!
  • There's a lot of power in a good name.