employee engagement – 4ward Associates

May 4, 2017

The Way ‘It’ Works

If you’re a small business owner or executive (church or non-profit leader), you don’t have time to work on one of the keys to organizational success: employee engagement. Your employees (and you) decide each day when they leave the house whether they’re going to be motivated and engaged (i.e. enthusiastic about doing their best and contributing to the success of your organization–the same sort of question you might ask yourself).

alarm clock — It’s Monday Morning….aaaagggghhhh!

Unfortunately, you probably don’t know how to effectively help their motivation. You can read lots of books, go to workshops and gets some ideas trying to figure out what proportion is self-motivation (intrinsic) and what proportion is your responsibility (extrinsic). We cut through the chaos and have created a framework. We coach you on what’s truly effective. We’ve proven it in our own organizations and with others.

Foundation of trustworthiness and good leadership
Knowing your team members’ motivators (e.g. the lowest proportion of the population is motivated solely by money)
Your own level of engagement (your staff’s is almost always less than yours)
Understanding the key drivers for engagement (they’re not what you may have read)
Understanding how to influence change
Putting all together on a daily basis

June 8, 2014

More Than a Hammer?

A clinic wanted to solve a problem of reducing the length of time between when a patient called for an appointment and when they could get in to see the physician. The clinic, at first, thought they should establish a Lean/Six Sigma project. Those are the tools most organizations have heard about, heard that they succeeded in improving other organization’s performance, and believe they should do the same thing.

There are a lot of tools out there to use. You have to know what questions you need to answer and what questions those tools answer to match the correct tool to your situation.

For the clinic, it was thinking about how to improve throughput. Often, the best set of tools to do that is Theory of Constraints: identifying the constraint (physicians’ time), making sure those resources are fully realized, subordinating other resources to them, and figuring out ways to expand capacity. Most companies fear using other less-efficient resources because they believe it costs more. In reality, if you can do more, have more throughput, you utilize more capacity and reduce costs. Putting less-efficient resources in place to help the constrained resource is better than not having the increased throughput. In this situation, better utilization of physician’s assistants and nurse practitioners helped the clinic see more patients, increased the clinic’s and the physicians’ incomes, and increased their market share.

Whether it’s Theory of Constraints or Open Book Management or Lean/Six Sigma or something else, we can help you find the right tools and get everyone engaged thinking through the right questions to get the right answers to create the success your organization deserves.

September 23, 2011November 3, 2011

How Many on Your Team Know How to Win?

What percentage of your employees are committed and highly engaged to the success of your organization?

100%? 90%? 75%? 50%? 25%? 10%?

Most answer around the 50% mark. Additionally, we often think that we can grow that percentage with some effort at making a change in our operations, or a bit more communication. (In one workshop, after asking for a show of hands at different percentages, I had a gentleman claim 100% of his employees were committed. “Are you a company of one?” I asked. “No, there’s two of us,” he replied pointing to his brother in the next chair. I observed to much laughter, “But he didn’t raise his hand!“)

Unfortunately, reality is far worse. Organizational change efforts acknowledge that 65-85% of all change efforts fail. That’s abysmal results!

According to a Harris poll of 23,000 employees, less than half know the company goals…and it gets worse.

In his book Using the Power of Purpose, Dean Tucker relates the poll results to a football team. As your offense faces your competition playing defense, you only have four employees who know they’re supposed to move the ball to the end zone they’re looking at. Only two know what position to play, only two care and only two think you can win. 9 out of the 11 would just as soon as root for the other team as much as they root for their own.

From my perspective, the only good news is that your competition has the same problem.

If you get more than 4 employees to know how to win the game, and care about it, believe they can win and actually cheer on your team, you have an advantage. If you’ve got six or eight, you’ll bowl over the competition!

I can show what the other experts overlook and why their results are horrible.

What I can show you is how to create the culture, collaboration and ownership thinking inside your company to overwhelm your competition. Together we’ll discover the opportunities and uncover the obstacles. It’ll be hard work, and it’ll take some time…but it’s worth it when you’re winning! And better yet, it’ll be fun!

Efforts with 4ward Associates — Buy-in Improves with 4ward Associates