A Simple (Yet Powerful) Framework for Employee Engagement

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It’s time to unpack Employee Engagement.

By now the benefits of having engaged employees – teams who come to work with their whole self and genuinely care about doing a good job – should be nothing new to you. But just in case they are, here’s a taste:

Highly engaged employees take 41% fewer sick days. They have 21% higher productivity, and 17% higher sales. They make 17% fewer mistakes.  This is what the actual statistics say.  Companies with the majority of highly engaged employees earn on average twice the revenue of companies whose employees drag their feet on the way to work.

And it makes sense, doesn’t it? If your team is dragging their feet on their way to work, then dragging their feet while they perform their work, they are not getting as much done as they could.  They are not happy, and that unhappiness has a big impact on your results as a leader.

But employee engagement goes deeper than that – much deeper. In fact, part of what I am about to show you is that by creating a workplace that enables a high engagement in your staff, you are actually doing something more meaningful than increasing your profit (although that is definitely nice). You’re doing a public service, and improving the community around which you work. You’re bringing happiness by reducing the effects caused by many workplaces like depression, anxiety and fatigue.  By improving your people, you’re improving the community, and by improving the community you’re improving the broader world around you.

In creating a workplace that has engaged employees, you are bringing meaning to your people’s work. Given that we spend the majority of our time at work (apart from sleeping), you are now giving meaning to their life. In giving meaning to a person’s life, you are meeting more of their basic and enhanced needs that, according to Maslow, bring happiness. In bringing happiness you are reducing things like depression. You’re reducing illness, as happy people have been proven to get sick less often (41% less often, actually).

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21 of the Best Pieces of Research on Employee Engagement (and How To Motivate Your Team)

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Employee Engagement Research & Sources

If you’ve read any form of leadership literature over the past year there’s a good chance you’ve heard about the epidemic that is sweeping the globe, and has been for some time.  No country is safe – whether it is a first world country with all the benefits a person could want, or a third world country where workers are truly exploited.

That epidemic is employee engagement.

Low engagement across the world in what should be a meaningful endeavor – work, has strangled productivity and is robbing employees around the world of their energy and happiness.  You see, it’s only in the last 100 years that work has really been separate from the management and planning.  And that separation has led to meaningless work, separated from the customers who benefit or the outcomes they produce.

Now more than 70% of employees, even in first world countries, are disengaged in their work.

I’ve put together a manifesto with a clear step-by-step guide to improving employee engagement, and below are the sources for research that all point to the same thing: We crave clarity, regular checking in from our leaders where they focus on our strengths, and continuous improvement, and despite what you may have experienced the meaning we can get from normal every day jobs runs very deep.

Let’s check it out!

  1. The State of the Global Workplace, Gallup
  2. Growth Mindset
  3. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
  4. Hertzberg’s Two Factor Theory
  5. Happiness, income satiation and turning points around the world
  6. High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being
  7. Eustress versus Distress
  8. Harvard Forces of Employee Engagement
  9. Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation
  10. SWOT Analysis For Management Consulting (Albert Humphrey)
  11. Do Employees Really Know What’s Expected of Them? Gallup
  12. The Million Dollar Checklist: Sustaining reductions in catheter related bloodstream infections
  13. The Person and the Situation – effects of environment on motivation
  14. Universal and Cultural Dimensions of Optimal Experiences
  15. Motivating Language Theory
  16. The Art of Motivating Employees
  17. Driving Engagement by Focusing on Strengths
  18. Inner Work Life: Understanding the Subtext of Business Performance
  19. Harvard, The Easiest Way To Change People’s Behavior
  20. Timing Matters: The Impact of Immediate and Delayed Feedback on Learning
  21. The Power of Feedback
  22. Google’s research on Clarity and Meaning

First, the statistics on the current engagement epidemic.

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Lean Management For White Collar Work – DO NOT Be Fooled By Well Meaning Consultants

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Lean Management white collar

When it comes to Lean Management in general, there is a lot of mis-information and mal-practice out there in the world.  After all, Lean Management and operational excellence sound good at face value.  If it’s been well defined, it will look like “Quality, Delivery, and Cost” – improving quality and tasks being first-time-right, improving delivery times and getting things to customers (and team-mates) faster, and reducing cost.  But most companies and leaders don’t even get that far.

Add to this another challenge – that being a manager often involves many parts of a business, not just manufacturing.

These are areas in your business that need Lean Management too – like technology, software or website development, customer service, sales, administration, human resources, quality assurance, projects, training, change programs, communications and much more.  They can all benefit from the right approach and start to improve on those Lean Management measures of “Quality, Delivery and Cost”.  But it just can’t be done using the old Lean Manufacturing way.

So buyer beware – Lean is traditionally a manufacturing methodology, and few (if any) leaders have gotten it right when applying it to the other important parts of a business – parts that are considered “white collar”.

Every company, even if they are primarily in manufacturing, has these white collar areas to be managed and apply true Lean Management to.  Sales have to be made, scheduling has to be done, items have to be handed between departments, customers have to be served.

So how do we adjust this decades-old approach to a white collar world to achieve real success?  Simple – we strip the principles of Lean and operational excellence back to their core, to the outcome they are trying to achieve, and take the parts that give us a meaningful result as leaders and applying true Lean Management.

Five Steps to Lean Management for White Collar Work

Before we define Lean Management for white collar work, traditional manufacturing Lean is based on a handful of solid principles, most commonly shown like this:

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A Framework For Operational Excellence and Customer Obsession

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This is a powerful definition of Operational Excellence, how it relates to Customer Obsession and has a huge impact on revenue, profit and employee engagement.  You can download a PDF version for yourself, free.  Enjoy!

 

A Framework For Operational Excellence and Customer Obsession

Operational Excellence.  It’s a term most of us have heard, maybe even used, but when it comes down to it few people know what it really, truly means.  Operational Excellence certainly sounds like something we should want – after all, everyone would say they want their business or team to operate well, and we want it to be excellent rather than average, right?

We need Operational Excellence

Operational Excellence is important enough for Jeff Bezos (the richest man in the world and the CEO of Amazon.com) to mention repeatedly in his shareholder letters, so there has to be some value in it.  And let me ruin the ending for you here – because when it comes to well defined operational excellence there is massive value indeed.

It’s a strategy that has helped Amazon become the most feared (and revered) business of the century so far – sending whole industries running for cover at the slightest mention of working there.  It’s a strategy that helped Toyota thrive for over 100 years in one of the toughest industries on earth.  It’s a strategy that took McDonald’s from one store to over 36,000 stores worldwide, and it’s a strategy that enabled Uber to grow to more than 2,000,000 drivers worldwide.  Bezos says:

Congratulations and thank you to the now over 560,000 Amazonians who come to work every day with unrelenting customer obsession, ingenuity, and commitment to operational excellence.

 

The thing is, when Jeff Bezos talks about customer obsession, he’s not talking about meeting a customer at a cash register and giving them a smile.  He’s talking about reducing any friction a customer might have in doing business with Amazon.com, and making it ridiculously easy for them to buy (and continue to buy) from them.

Which gives us some good news.  When it comes to Customer Obsession and Operational Excellence, those two things are 100% related.

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Leadership Card 33 – Problem Solve for Exponential Growth

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Leadership Card 33 – Problem Solve for Exponential Growth

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Solving The Root Cause of Operational Problems

Wow, that’s a mouthful, isn’t it?  Solving the root cause of operational problems.  What does that even mean?  Well it must mean something, because Jeff Bezos (he’s the CEO of Amazon.com if you haven’t heard of him, and currently the richest man in the world) makes a point of doing it day in and day out in his business, and ensuring his managers do the same.

And it might sound fancy but in fact it’s very simple – find out what is bothering your customers, then don’t just fix it one time, fix the reason behind it.  Here’s an example from the book “One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon” by Richard Brandt:

“When one elderly woman sent an email to the company saying she loved ordering books from the site but had to wait for her nephew to come over and tear into the difficult-to-open packaging, Bezos had the packaging redesigned to make it easier to open.”

 

He had the packaging redesigned.  He didn’t just apologize.  He didn’t go to her home and open the package one time.  He had the packaging redesigned so it wouldn’t happen again.

Lean Cartoon Next 352 Problems

Companies With the High Velocity Edge

A man by the name of Steven Spear found the same thing, through research in his book “The High Velocity Edge”.  Companies who outperformed others over long periods of time had leaders who:

  1. Designed their work to reveal problems and opportunities
  2. Solved the root cause of those problems
  3. Shared that knowledge throughout the organisation, then;
  4. Developed the problem solving skill in others.

This meets the actions of Jeff Bezos perfectly.  By solving the root cause of problems customers are having, they stop those problems from happening again.  They are saving time, money, and retaining customers.  Then by sharing that knowledge and building the problem solving skill in others, the managers and teams at Amazon.com are building upon previous successes in a way that starts as small improvements and gains, but soon grows to large gains as the improvements compound on each other.

Start and Finish with a Repeatable Process

Problem solving by itself may not give you the results you want.  If you improve something, but don’t lock in those changes, there’s a good chance things will revert to normal after a short period of time.

This is where a standard, repeatable process comes in to play.  By ensuring each product we sell, and each operational process we perform to get there has a clear, repeatable way of doing it, we can use that process to improve.  Something as simple as a checklist, or screenshots, can work wonders with ensuring everyone knows what to do and can do it the same great way every time.

Then when you improve things, you can lock in the changes by updating the process, checklist, screenshots (or any other way you prefer), so the improvement isn’t lost and you can continue to grow over time.

In that way, small incremental improvements will compound on each other over time, leading to large improvements overall.

In that way, solving operational problems is the key to operational excellence.  And by solving problems your customers bring to you (whether through complaints or other feedback) you are unlocking the door to a customer obsession mindset.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Leadership Card 32 – Checking In To Increase Engagement (and Customers)

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Leadership Card 32 – Checking In to Increase Engagement (and Customers)

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The Best, Most Loved Leaders Check in Regularly With Their Team

The Gallup business journal recently found that there is a very clear way to increase your team’s engagement in their work.  They found that leaders who check in at least once a week with each individual in their team, while focusing on their strengths, saw up to a 27% increase in engagement.

To put that into perspective, companies in the top quartile of engagement have enjoyed twice the revenue of companies in the bottom quartile of engagement, according to a study by Kenexa.  Other studies by Gallup have shown lower absenteeism (by 41%), improved sales rates, and significantly improved productivity in companies with highly engaged staff.  Improving your engagement by 27% could easily move you into that top quartile where all the magic happens.

Do you want to be a leader that everybody loves?  Check in with people regularly, and focus on their strengths.  Part of this comes down to another key to increasing engagement – in fact some people have called it the main key.  And that is progress.

Employee Engagement cartoon Making Progress

By checking in regularly with your team, and focusing on their strengths, you are facilitating both a sense of progress, and the likelihood of real progress itself.  Teresa Amabile found in her research and writings called “The Progress Principle” that people’s happiness increased when they had a sense of progress.  In fact, there’s a good chance you can relate to this.  How many times have you thought about (or actually gone ahead with) quitting your job or business plan because you weren’t making any progress?

So check in with your team, focus on their strengths, and make sure they are on the right track making progress.

Check In With Your Customers To Significantly Increase Sales

Retaining customers can be one of the hardest things in business, but when you get it right, studies have found very real increases in revenue and profit.  One study by the author of The Ultimate Question 2.0 (Frederick Reichheld) found that retaining an extra 5% of your customers led to an increase in profit of between 25% and 95%.  And if you think about it, it makes sense.  Most of the cost to acquire a customer is spent up front, with advertising, brand awareness, many meetings or phone calls and even steep sales discounts.  But once a customer has formed a habit of doing business with your company, there is a much lower chance they will go searching for something else.

And this is where feedback comes in.

It’s such a simple concept, yet almost no company does it well (outside of many of the best, most profitable companies).  You want to search out customer feedback.  Are you getting complaints?  Great!  At least your customers are telling you.  Don’t hide away from the complaints – they are free feedback that is worth its weight in gold if you know how to fix their problem and improve.

Customer feedback might take the form of a survey, a Facebook or Google review, a complaint (as we noted) or even praise (statistically less likely, but still nice).  And when we get any type of feedback, we want to solve the operational problems that lead to anything negative.

Lean Cartoon Fix Operational Problems

Work taking too long?  Solve the operational problem behind it.  Staff on-site leaving a mess after their work?  Solve the operational problem behind it.  Quality of the product not lasting long enough?  Solve the operational problem behind it.

And – here’s where things come full circle – the best way to solve operational problems is to ensure you have a standard, repeatable process in place and then check in regularly to ensure it is being done.  And if it’s being done, but the results are still bad, then you improve the repeatable process and roll it out again.

Rinse and repeat on your way to exponential growth – just buy me a beer when you pass your first million.

There’s the other side to this tale as well – as your business grows and you rely on repeatable processes more, if you don’t check in to see if those processes are giving you the outcome you want, there is a good chance you’ll run into trouble.  If you don’t check, you can’t adjust, and if you don’t adjust, you may not get the results you want.  Pilots check their course regularly on their way to their destination, and so should you, by checking in with your team, your customers, and making sure they are getting the outcomes they want.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Lean CX ScoreGet "The Lean CX Score" now, and start creating disruptors in your industry that completely annihilate your competition.

Oh and good news!  You'll be improving the speed, morale and engagement of your teams at the same time.  Get the Lean CX Score now.

Leadership Card 31 – Impossible To Make A Mistake (Lean CX)

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Leadership Card 31 – Impossible To Make A Mistake

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We all make mistakes.  In fact, making mistakes usually is a good way to learn and become better in life.  But what happens when we allow – even encourage – our customers to make mistakes as they try to buy from us?  Or what about your team members, trying to do a good job in your business, but thwarted (yes, thwarted) by long, convoluted processes that seem to trip them up at every turn?

Making things easy is the real key to engaging your workers, getting customers to buy from you, and ultimately getting the results you deserve in your business.  And making things easy is done in a few ways, but one of the best ways is to find a way to make it impossible to make a mistake, as your team or your customer goes through their process.

If it’s impossible for them to make a mistake when they buy from you, they are more likely to buy.  If your team can’t make a mistake in the work that they do, they are more likely to do it.  But it also works the other way.  If it is possible, even easy, for your team to make mistakes, then they may have to redo their task over and over again, costing you more, frustrating them and reducing their engagement.

Designing your work intentionally to make it harder to make mistakes takes work, which is why most leaders don’t do it.  Instead, they fall on the crutch of “hiring the right people” or “hiring people smarter than themselves” and letting those superstars get to work.  But here’s the thing – hiring superstars is expensive.  And even when you do, there’s still an 80% chance they will be a dud – not matching the culture of your team, getting bored with the work, or wanting to go in different directions than your team, and the way they do things is ultimately still hidden in their minds (not made visible for all to see).

It is MUCH better, easier and cheaper for you to simply hire nice people – collaborative people – and give them the right boundaries with a repeatable process where it’s impossible to make a mistake.

After all, McDonald’s did it, and now it’s a multinational company with over 36,000 stores that has run for nearly eighty years.  Uber did it, and it’s now it has scaled across the globe and is worth 70 Billion Dollars.  Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, all the big names you hear about know the power of making it impossible to make a mistake.  They’ve all done it separately in different ways and have all had stellar success.  How will you do it?

Yes, you will have to brainstorm with your team.  Yes, you will have to put in a little extra work to make your process simpler.  But the rewards you will see are 100 times worth the effort.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Leadership Card 30 – Make it Visual, Lean CX Model

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Leadership Card 30 – Make it Visual, Lean CX Model

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A picture is worth a thousand words.  That’s what they say.  Sure, it may be an old saying, and who knows where it started?  But the thing is, it’s right.

One study found that adding pictures increased understanding and recall of information 98% of the time.  So if you’re a leader and you want your people to do something, or if you’re a business owner or entrepreneur and you want your customers to buy something, making it visual is a huge part of them getting and retaining that information so they can do what you want.

Making it visual means taking your process from being hidden in someone’s mind, and writing it down or putting it on a wall so everyone can see it.  Or better yet, taking that 1000 word report and turning it into one chart that people can easily and quickly understand.

The best websites have a user experience that visually guides their customers in the direction they want.  The best software development teams have simple red or green lights when development environments are working or when they are not.  Uber gave its customers a GPS map where you could see how many cars were close by to pick you up.

A picture is worth a thousand words.  It is also around 1000 times faster at conveying the information you want, to the people you want.

Making things visible also brings clarity to your work and engagement to your people.  When your team are uncertain of what they need to do, they are more likely to be disengaged and also more likely to not do the work – that’s what the research says.  Making the work clear and the process visible goes a long way to improving your performance and your results.

What Can You Do In Your Own Work?

Is there “hidden” information you can make visible in your own work?  Maybe it’s your best performing team member and how she does her work.  Maybe it’s clarity on the next steps your customer has to take (or will go through) in their customer experience.  All of these things are often hidden, and not clearly exposed for people to see, because it actually takes extra work for us to bring them out into the open.  Most people won’t do it.  But if and when you do, your team will be more engaged, and your customers will buy more often.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Leadership Card 29 – Reduce The Steps, Lean CX Model

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Leadership Card 29 – Reduce The Steps, Lean CX Model

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There’s an old saying that goes: “The journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step.”  It’s a great saying, and it’s a nice way to remind yourself to keep going and keep taking those steps when things get tough.

The only thing is, let’s say you’re a company selling software and you make your customers take 1000 steps to get what they want.  They might do it for a while, especially if you’re the only one selling that software.

But then another company comes along, and it gives your customers what they want in one step.  One single step.  Not 1000.  Just one.  Pretty soon, all your customers have gone to your competitor for the simple reason that it was easy to do so.  Nobody really wants to take that “journey” of 1000 miles or 1000 steps.

I bring this up because this is what many companies are doing in real life – they are making their customers jump through hoops, take extra steps, and take extra actions just to get what they want.  And they are doing this, of course, until Amazon comes along, gives customers one click ordering and ridiculously fast delivery and the other company falls apart.

Reducing the steps to people getting what they want is the master key to huge success in business.  It’s success with your customers, and it’s success in your teams.  The simple fact is that most companies and teams have not clearly articulated what they do, the outcomes they give, and how to get to those outcomes.  After all, that’s too mundane, right?  Why should they write down the steps they take to get customers (internal and external) what they want?  And you might think that way too, until you hear that nearly 50% of workers actually aren’t sure on what is expected of them in their job.  In other words, 1 in 2 people probably aren’t doing what you need them to do, because they simply don’t know what it is.  Why write it down?  Because you can’t reduce what you haven’t articulated in the first place.

Uber gave customers one-tap ordering of a ride, and now it’s a 70 billion dollar company.  Amazon Kindle gave you one click ordering of eBooks, and it has all but decimated physical book stores around the world.  Microsoft gave you Windows so you could click on what you wanted, when DOS (typing into a green screen) was still a thing.  Most of you won’t remember DOS because it basically disappeared from view once Windows was released.

Also, have you ever noticed that complicated things tend to break more often?  That complicated system, complicated code, complicated buying process, complicated risk review or complicated creation of the annual shareholder report – where things are complicated with too many steps, hand-offs, rework, and waiting, then things tend to break.

Reducing the steps is one of those keys to making things more robust, making things easier to do, easier to use.  And when things are easier to do, people tend to do them.  That means the people in your team, and helping them to do what you want.

So many leaders, when I speak to them, blame the people for not doing what they want them to do.  But when it comes down to it, it’s the complicated and uncertain process that causes their team to flounder.

Simplify things, and you will see incredible rewards.

Chat soon – Dave

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Leadership Card 28 – Make It Repeatable (Lean CX Model)

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Leadership Card 28 – Make It Repeatable (Lean CX model)

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How does a single restaurant manage to stay in business?  Thousands of restaurants go out of business every year.  Possibly hundreds of thousands, if you look at the industry around the world.  So how does one manage to survive?

But then let’s take it a step further – how does a restaurant not only survive, thrive, scaling to over 36,000 stores worldwide?

36,000 stores.  That’s roughly how many McDonald’s family restaurants there are around the globe, and it all started with a single one nearly 80 years ago.  The McDonald brothers made burgers so well, so fresh, and so fast, and so repeatably that their model was able to be scaled to other stores quickly.  It could be taught quickly, it could be replicated quickly, and each new store could have success quickly all because of one simple approach: Capturing their process and making it repeatable.

You see, every tiny piece of the process that went into making a McDonald’s hamburger was looked at, written down, and then improved and streamlined until it was the fastest burger at a very low price that could be found anywhere, for a long time.

By making their process so repeatable by anyone who came along, they were able to hire kids still in school, as their first job, and train them in their repeatable process.  They didn’t need to hire people with degrees (costing them more) and anyone they did hire had great success at their work because it was made clear and simple.

2018 and Beyond – Scaling Drivers Worldwide

But it’s not just burgers that have a process that can be made repeatable.  It’s anything.  And when you do this, you can scale your business beyond anything you had ever thought of before.

In 2009, could you have ever imagined that more than two million individual drivers from around the world would all be trained and working towards a common goal?  Well that’s exactly what Uber has done, and exactly why it is worth 70 billion dollars today.  They used the power of technology and delivered it in an app, error proofing with automatic payments, GPS tracking and simple visual management where you could see exactly where your driver or passenger was.  They made the process repeatable.

What Can You Make Repeatable?

Now it’s over to you.  Everything can be made repeatable, and everything can be simplified.  What are some areas in your business that you just know you need to clarify, write down the steps for, and then make a little bit simpler?

The Lean CX (or Ease of Use) framework shows you exactly how to simplify your work and your customer experience.  Clarifying the steps to getting the outcomes you want, therefore making them repeatable by anyone, is the first step to simplification.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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