Forging Employee Experience

Motivation. If you can understand what motivates your employees, you’ll have summarily solved your organizations engagement problem. 

Unfortunately, the journey of understanding each employee’s individual source of motivation is long and difficult. While everyone is motivated by something, sources of motivation are as unique as the people themselves. Here in lies the burden of leadership, managers must know what motivates their people. It is impossible for the company executives to both understand and make policies that are custom tailored to all the employees. So, the burden rests with managers to make sure they lead their people according to what moves them. 

When trying to better address the ever elusive “why” behind employee engagement issues, organizations must ensure they have created an environment that allows management to find real answers. All too often, organizations pass along as lip service the idea of management empowerment, which encourages them to run their teams they way they want to produce the best work. At the same time these same organizations enforce so much bureaucratic approval processes that nothing gets done without their bosses’ boss giving the sign off. 

If organizations consistently reinforce the idea that management doesn’t actually have the power to make real meaningful decisions, then in time managers will stop trying to effect positive change in their teams. They will stop trying to figure out what moves their employees to greatness because even if they could figure it out, they’re powerless to enable those aspirations. 

Without being able to motivate employees, organizations will be stuck in the void of low engagement. 

In a recent podcast, Lindsay McGregor, author of Primed to Perform and cofounder of Vega Factor, explained to us the science behind employee motivation. She described three instrumental characteristics to ensure that employees are fully motivated: play, purpose, and potential. She asserts that work needs to have elements that are enjoyable. People want to have an amount of fun while doing any task so why not help make work a little more fun? That fun shouldn’t just be random and directionless but be focused and with purpose. Everything that people do at work should have a purpose. Useless and boring tasks will demotivate people very quickly. Finally, the work should drive people to reach their potential. To reach out to Lindsey, visit her at her LinkedIn page.

Everybody has drive. Everybody has passion. As humans, there are things that move us and inspire us to be better than we are. While the specifics behind each person’s motivation vary tremendously, it’s imperative to understand that each of us has something for which we are willing to go above and beyond. Only organizations that enable managers to affect change in their employees’ lives will find success motivating their people. 

Despite our audio problems to get this episode started, we talk through the amazing chat we had with Bek Chee. 

Often the story of poor employee engagement seems connected with companies that have been around for a long time. Typically, these organizations hold on to how things have always been done. With such a long history, it’s no surprise that there is a resistance to new processes and crafting a new culture. However, we live in a world of growing companies. These young, new companies are founded on ideals of innovation and effecting change. While it’s easy to have a pulse on employee engagement and to carefully create the company culture in the early stages, most organizations struggle to hold on to their roots as they grow.

No young company expects to survive without innovation. By and large all the good ideas have been taken. In order to advance, organizations must innovate their product/service offering. But what about their company culture? Most organizations don’t take enough time cultivating their growing company’s culture, until it’s too late. As organizations grow, owners must ensure that the collaborative, trusting environment that was essential to fostering the innovation that built the company, is maintained through growth.

The most important element of maintaining a strong, desirable company culture is onboarding. As owners in a growing company expand and begin to hire managers, it is imperative that these managers not only have the skillset necessary to get the job done, but that they will also be responsible for contributing to the cultural identity of the company. One of the biggest mistakes a young company can make, as it relates to ensuring the survival of the original culture, is to hire for skill and not character. Very few skills can’t be learned on the job. Doctors, lawyers, and handful of other degree-heavy professionals can’t afford to learn things live. Most everyone else, in almost every other profession, can be taught how to do a job. So, when young organizations think to the future of what their business will become, a critical component of that vision should be what the company culture will look like.

If organizations maintain the company culture that defined them in the beginning when they had no employees, then the employees that join as the organization grows, will have a fantastically positive experience. It is so much easier to maintain positive culture during growth than to let it grow wild and try to fix it later. 

In a recent podcast, we had the opportunity to speak with Head of Talent at Atlassian, Bek Chee. In our conversation, we learned that this is an organization that epitomizes this concept maintaining strong, positive company culture. Founded in 2002, in Sydney Australia, Atlassian boasts impressive employee engagement scores in excessive of 80%. Employees love working there. When asked how the organization accomplished such an impressive feat, Chee responded that the company had always stayed very close to its roots and maintained the great culture it was built on. For more insights on cultivating an incredible employee experience, listen to the rest of the podcast at Forging Employee Experience. Feel free to reach out to Bek Chee via LinkedIn.

By keeping a hand on the metaphorical culture steering wheel, growing organizations can ensure they never lose what made them great from the beginning. 

Listen to this great recap that Josh and Alexander put on the episode with Michael Beck. 

For more information visit www.forgeant.com. 

We'll see you there!

My knee-jerk reaction is to blame the Employee Engagement epidemic on the increase of Millennials in the workforce. Though they may complain the loudest, they can’t be fairly pegged as the culprits behind the low engagement in the workspace. Looking at the Gallup numbers around 80% of employees world-wide aren’t engaged, but the workforce only consists of about 50% Millennials. Assuming every single Millennial is disengaged (impossible) that still leaves a very large percentage of other generations that are also not engaged. Furthermore, the research behind such high disengagement in the workforce goes back well before Millennials were in the workforce. Prognosis? Employee Engagement is a workforce problem, not a generational problem. 

At the end of the day, all people problems are really leadership problems. Low levels of engagement follow bad leaders. If an organization has too many of these bad leaders, they’ll find the bulk of their workforce simply isn’t engaged. To fix this problem, organizations must make sure they have better leaders leading their workforce. Leadership development is a very robust and advanced industry. The number of fixes and strategies organizations have at their disposal is truly staggering; however, one of the must effective of these strategies is intelligent promotion.

All too often, a contributor is promoted to a leadership/management role because they are good at their job. For example, the top salesman is a very likely candidate for sales manager. But does being good at selling a product mean a person will be good at leading a team? Impossible to say. There’s simply no correlation between the two. Truth be told, most individuals who excel in their field probably don’t want to be bothered by the administrative burden that comes with management. Yet, these high performers still aspire to be managers and continue to be promoted. Why? Because all too often, the pay bump from contributor to manager is too much to pass up. Paying a person more because they take on extra responsibilities is both fair and equitably, but it can also have unintended consequences. In this case, promoting an associate simply because he or she is a high performer will almost certainly lead to the creation of a disengaged team. Leadership skills are different and need to be treated differently and cultivated differently. This doesn’t mean that a high performer with no leadership skills can’t acquire those skills, but it does mean that if organizations wants to enhance the Employee Experience, they’ll need to ensure that all of their managers are trained to be good leaders.

In a podcast with Michael Beck, he brought up how leaders shape the company culture (a reflection of the Employee Experience). He defined company culture as the set of values and behaviors that an organization will tolerate. He went on to say that if leaders simply establish a set of shared values, they’ll like not find the results they want. However, if managers across all levels are actively encouraging and supporting those shared values, then the organization will become those shared values – or culture. To listen to Michael’s full podcast, visit Forging Employee Experience and to keep in touch with Michael you can follow him on twitter @Michael_Beck or visit his website. His, Eliciting Excellence, can be purchased on Amazon.

Employee Engagement is a vital metric to understanding the health of an organization. If companies want to help positivel

In this episode we discuss the great learning outcomes from Andria's podcast. 

Andria is an expert at practically applying the principles of Employee Engagement, we'd hate for you to miss out on her perspective. 

For more information, listen to the full interview. 

https://anchor.fm/forgeant/episodes/No-Excuse-for-Slow-Moving-Employee-Engagement-with-Andria-Ink-e36jea

The Employee Engagement industry is filling up with software solutions that enable organizations to more quickly implement effective Employee Engagement initiatives. However, even in organizations where this software is being used, companies tend to move slowly when trying to affect change that would boost engagement. There is no excuse for not prioritizing and implementing change.

By and large, customers won’t buy in to an organization if the employees haven’t already bought in to it. If the employees aren’t having a positive experience, that energy will flow to the customers and sales won’t be as strong. However, when organizations allow their employees to have an experience that excites, customers will flock to the product (assuming the product isn’t terrible). 

In a recent podcast with Andrea Ink, head of Employee Engagement at BC Hydro, we had the chance to understand how she takes the lead on building an employee experience that employees love. She works for a government-controlled agency that, while using only an annual survey, boasts 84% engagement among employees. In her company, she focuses on making sure that everyone is seen, felt, and heard. These fruits of these efforts are partly seen in the success of the employee council that connects top level management with the workforce to make sure that everyone is being heard. The result of fostering a spirit of collaboration from top level executives and employee representatives has been the creation of a company culture where employees know they have a voice and that the organization is listening. 

Andrea spoke volumes about how important it is as leader to always be present to listen and observe any issues that employees may be having. She focused on the idea that leaders must always be communicating information up and down the organization. Finally, she emphasized the notion of “follow-up and follow-through.” Every leader should make sure they follow-up with the communications they have with their groups, and they must always follow through with promises and commitments. To listen to the full podcast, please visit Forging Employee Experience. To connect with Andrea, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.

If a government organization that only has official Employee Engagement survey once a year, can create a culture where people love to work, then so can anyone else. There is no excuse to not being quick and decisive in implementing new Employee Engagement initiatives. The employees and customers deserve the best experience. 

Join us as we delve in to the learning outcomes of Kevin Kruse's podcast. He shared some wonderful insights and we tease out the most applicable and relevant here so you can take what you need and get back to work. 

These REFORGE episodes will be posted after every guest so feel free to listen up on all things Employee Experience.

Boosting Employee Engagement scores don’t happen with the thoughtless purchase of more employee perks. This comes as both good and bad news for organizations looking to increase the engagement levels of their employees. On the one hand, the research shows that simply buying stuff for employees doesn’t actually move the needle. Organizations don’t need to spend huge amounts of money on perks to help engage their employees. Unfortunately, the most effective solution is decidedly more difficult than just throwing money at the problem. Companies need to focus on converting employees to their vision.

Most for-profit organizations spend their time focused on revenue generating activities. Understandably, companies want to make sure that their resources are spent to increases shareholder value. Acting otherwise would be a disservice to stakeholders and to the customers. However, lost in the pursuit of financial strength is often the fact that employees aren’t automatically as driven to boost sales and drive down costs as top management. Employees join a company for a paycheck but stay at a company for a cause. The burden of converting employees to the company’s cause is critical to helping win the hearts and minds of the workforce and boosting employee engagement. Implicit in the idea that an organization can convert employees to its cause is that the organization actually has a cause. “Making money” or “increasing shareholder value” is unfortunately not a cause. Instead companies need to have a passionate, driving force that motivates its members to give it their all. Once that cause is established an organization can begin to rally its employees. 

In a recent podcast with Keven Kruse, he mentioned that employees should be able to say, “I care about our goals.” This simple phrase carries profound meaning to an organization. It implies that an organization has established a cause with which it can inspire its employees and that those employees have internalized those goals and honestly care about reaching them. To listen to the full episode, visit Forging Employee Experience. To connect with Kevin send him an email at [email protected]. For more information about his books visit his Amazon page.

By helping ensure that employees are converted to the company’s vision, organizations create a sustainable culture that employees will never want to leave. Though difficult, the work required to convert employees will pay off exponentially. Without spending a dime, organizations can watch their engagement scores climb as they enhance their employee’s workplace experience.

We begin to get a feel for a room from the first step we take inside. We feel temperature, light, air quality, and aesthetics. After spending time co-occupying that space with other people, we begin to feel and sense a group vibe. We’ve all been to parties that should be awesome but aren’t or family dinners that check all the boxes to make it great but it’s not. These same experiences shape the workplace. Are the feelings and vibes real or perceived? Does it matter?

When employees come to work every day, they are met with a feeling. The office lighting, the floor plan, the general comfort, and the demeanor of colleagues all play a key role in shaping how employees feel about the environment they work in. This general feeling when applied universally to all employees is a large driver for company culture. But some organizations are met with frustration when they go through the motions checking all the great-place-to-work checkboxes and find their employees still perceive a lackluster experience. Whose fault is this? It doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, the company leadership maintains primary responsibility for how the workplace feels and feelings are subjective. The reason so many organizations fall short of cultivating a great company culture is because they can’t get past the fact that it doesn’t matter how many great things the organization does on culture. Most important is how the employees perceive the company. 

The million-dollar question: how do we fix it? Books can and have been written trying to answer this very question. However, one of the best places to start is with communication. We live in a society that has embraced text-based forms of communication. Most of the communication that happens with in businesses occurs in written form. To try and turn back the clocks and shy away from an emotion-poor, communication median is pointless. The best alternative companies have is to shift to a concerted effort of infusing emotion into written language. 

In a podcast with Scott Halford, he brought to light another concept that can help craft a positive perception of an organization’s culture. Backed with research from his book, Scott suggests that creating a brain-friendly environment will drastically increase the productivity and efficiency of employees. To that end, companies must both embrace change allowing for the transition to a brain-friendly environment and create a place where progress is measured and rewarded. To listen to the full podcast at Forging Employee Experience and connect with Scott visit www.completeintelligence.com or www.scotthalford.com.

Molding another person’s perception takes a huge amount of effort. Companies can’t take shortcuts and change doesn’t happen overnight. By listening to employees and understanding how they are feeling, organizations can know if their efforts to saturate communication with emotion and create a brain-friendly culture are successful.