Maslow Hierarchy of needs and employee engagement

Keys to Employee Engagement: 9. Commitment

Published January 21, 2016 | By Ron Jamieson

 

So far, in this series, we’ve talked about ensuring employees have a clear idea of what is expected of them and helping them realize that by providing them the tools to do the job right.  Employees can be inspired by the company’s mission, which can give them a strong sense of purpose.

I’ve seen several organizations where the majority of employees are excited about coming to work every day but a few slackers were enough to bring down the mood in the office.  It can be hard to sustain your motivation if your co-workers undermine all the good work you do by not caring.

So the ninth question in Gallup’s Q12 explores this, posing, “Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?”

 

Gallup suggests this commitment by fellow workers, along with four other measures is correlated with productivity.  When employees, overall, feel their fellow employees share their commitment to the organization, the productivity of the organization increases.

(The other four measures were: “I know what is expected of me”, “My opinions are valued”, “ I believe in the company’s mission” and “Overall satisfaction”.)

Imagine how it must feel for someone who takes pride in their work and who does an excellent job to hand off their work to someone who drops the ball or is careless how they do their part of the task or project.  Similarly, you’ll find in many companies employees who have to correct others’ mistakes or sloppiness so they can hand off to the next operation.  They must feel constantly frustrated.

From a customer’s point of view, shoddy workmanship usually shows up in defective materials.  They have to call in the sales rep to assess the scope of the problem, segregate defective materials and work out some form of compensation as well as paperwork to return the defective goods.  In a worst case scenario, the customer may have to shut down their line and lay off people – then ask for even more compensation for lost work and possibly lost business.

What can you do about this?

One of the easiest ways to start addressing this is by going out on the shop floor (or office) and talk to the employees one on one to work your way through the process to identify which employee(s) are contributing to the situation.

Improving the calibre of their work may simply be a matter of training them or providing the proper tools to do their task right. It might mean modifying the process (by automation, for example) to remove the human element from affecting the outcome.

If the root cause of the problem is attitude, that is a much harder issue to deal with.  It may mean terminating employees.  In some cases, not getting rid of employees who don’t care about their jobs can be seen by employees as weak management or a demonstration that management doesn’t care or lacks commitment to the company’s mission.  You can risk losing your best employees in this type of situation.  So, sometimes terminating bad employees have a positive overall effect on morale and productivity.

Getting out on the shop floor is one way to demonstrate to employees that management cares about what’s happening in the plant. Speaking with them one on one is one way to show that management cares about employees’ opinions.  Correcting problems in the plant shows employees that management can not only act on their input, but also walk the talk.  In other words, they have enough commitment to the company’s mission to make things work.

Talk is cheap. Action gets results.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Applied to Employee Engagement

What makes an employee highly engaged

Employee Engagement & Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

A CEO’s secrets to successful employee engagement

"Keeping employees engaged means enabling them to “see themselves in the room.”

For people to stay at an organization and feel engaged, they have to “see themselves in the room.” If you have bright young people who don’t see themselves at the top, they’ll punch their time cards and then move on—and that’s a shame. There are a couple of things you need to do to keep that from happening.

First, you need to identify the key people who, with a little mentoring, coaching or outside training, could be promoted quicker than most. Then you make the differential investment to get those people ready. The worst thing you can do is promote a diverse candidate who’s not ready. That sets the individual up to fail and it sets the organization’s diversity efforts back as the naysayers and skeptics say “I told you so.”

The second thing you need to do is take care of the people who have long-term potential. How do you keep them satisfied? The key is to identify who is really great versus who is average. Again, make a differential investment in the great ones so they can continue to move up. For those who are above average, offer them some of the opportunities to improve so they can move from above average to very good. You don’t necessarily need to promote this group to keep them happy—they need to earn it.

Find out what’s really going on at the front lines.
I started having ice cream socials where I would bring 15 people into a room and give them the freedom to speak “anonymously.” To make it work, I made up my mind never to appear insulted or offended. And I had a rule that the only person who could be quoted outside of that room was me. This really helped to promote a safe-to-speak-up environment.

I would also go to our call centers and hold focus groups by myself with the people who answer the phones. It’s amazing what you find out from the people who are doing the day-to-day work when you create a safe environment. HQ has great intentions when policies are created, but sometimes those don’t work out when the rubber meets the road.

For example: the call center folks were evaluated on certain metrics—and one was whether they used the caller’s name six times in a conversation. That’s fine in a two- to three-minute call. But when it’s a simple inquiry, using the caller’s name six times within the 20-second call sounds unfriendly and forced—which completely defeats the purpose. Those moments make you realize that you really need to listen to what’s going on at the ground level.

BPGs are a tremendous resource.
Toyota does a great job with business partnering groups (BPGs) and they host a variety of events throughout the year. I still vividly recall the time I went to an African-American Collaborative (AAC) luncheon. The speaker had me spellbound and it was a huge “aha!” moment for me. Previously, I thought that these groups were more like clubs than working groups. But once I went, I realized how important they can be to the success of the organization.

Since then, I’ve encouraged BPG engagement from the top. The people that run the BPGs meet with key leaders to inform them of their objectives. We also dispel the notion that you have to have a certain background to join a BPG. In other words, you don’t need to be black to get involved with the African-American Collaborative. Anyone can learn a tremendous amount by going. We started with two BPGs in the organization and we now have nine, all of which work together collaboratively.

Show people it’s important to be present by being present.
The other lesson I learned from attending BPG events is that the simple act of showing up has a huge impact. I was stunned by the reaction of others to my being there. They were thrilled that someone at my level would go, and I was thanked time and again. Normally, no one ever thanks me for going to meetings! So I started talking about it. I didn’t mandate that people go, but I talked about the events I went to and what I learned. People think that if it’s important to the boss then maybe they should go, too.

Does your organization have employee resource groups like TFS’ BPGs? Do they get executive-level engagement? 


George Borst, CEO of Toyota Financial Services (TFS), was named the winner of the “Outstanding CEO Award” at our 2013 Women in Leadership Institute™. In September, he retired after 16 years at the helm of TFS. George recently shared what he has learned about leadership and employee engagement throughout the course of his career.  

Improve Employee Engagement By Boosting Management Support

Adrian Swinscoe,

Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing Peter A. Hunter, an author and authority on employee engagement 

During the interview, Peter shared a story of how he built an engaged team. The story revolved around his time in the Navy when he was put in charge of a team of very experienced people. On meeting them, he realised that there was no way he could take a ‘traditional’ approach to managing them, ie. telling them what to do, as they knew much more about the job in hand than he ever could. Rather, he worked out that the best way for him to ‘manage’ the team, and get the best out of them, was to find out what they needed to complete their work and then get it for them.

The result was a team that produced incredible results, cared about themselves, their work, their colleagues (inside and outside of their team), and the wider organisation.

I really like Peter’s approach as it focuses on management as facilitation rather than management as control.

In the interview, he then went onto suggest steps that any manager could take to help improve engagement in their team. These include getting your team together, on a regular basis, and asking them a series of questions:

• What have you just done?
• What went well?
• What went badly?
• What can we do to ensure that things continue to go well? and
• What can we do to avoid things going badly next time?

Now, this part of the interview reminded me of another conversation, one I had with a global HR Director of an international financial services firm. We were chatting following a talk I had just given at their firm about the link between customer and employee engagement when she:

“I believe that if we could make all of our managers better managers then we’d have a more engaged workforce”.

I think she is right and this builds on the idea that one of the main influencers of engagement in the workplace is the relationship an individual, or a team, have with their immediate boss.

This could be helped more and better management training. But, before going out and commissioning lots of extra training, how about another approach? Could we not better support managers by helping them focus a little more on engagement as part of their regular management duties? Could that not be done by the managers of managers asking the following questions of them on a regular basis:

1. Is your team engaged?
2. If yes, why do you think that?
3. If no, what can you do to help them do their make their jobs easier?

When it comes to employee engagement, rather than more training or more surveys or other responses, could we not generate better results by spending more time helping our managers help their own people succeed? As Peter says:

“The culture we want to create already exists. We just need to let it happen.”

And

“People, generally, want to show up for work and do a good job. They want to be proud of what they do. They want to use their education, creativity and imagination to do work that they are proud of.”

Employee Engagement: Improving a Damaged Process

One company I worked for made flexible pouches for the medical device, food and military markets.

 

I'd just recently joined and was following my first order through the plant, so I was still getting to know the people in the production department as well as the processes they used to make our products.

 

When I came around to the line where my customer's product was being made, I noticed nearly all the operators had bandaids on their thumbs.  So I asked one of them why so many people were wearing bandaids.

 

This particular customer's product was formed and then diecut to shape in a second operation. To ensure the printing on the pouch was in register to the seals and the overall shape of the pouch, we used what is called a pin registration system. This means that, when the pouch is formed, a series of holes are simultaneously punched around the perimeter of the pouch. When the pouch is diecut, it is placed on a board with a steel ruled die and the holes punched in the pouch fit onto pins mounted in the die board to ensure the pouch is cut consistently and with print in register with the seals and the overall shape.

 

In this case, the operator explained they were puncturing their thumbs as they struggled to stretch the pouch over the die board to align pins with holes in the pouch. The pins being used were actually nails which, of course, had sharp points.  Moreover, the nails were aluminum roofing nails and were so soft the operators were constantly trying to straighten them out - the tension of the stretched pouch was causing the roofing nails to bend.

 

This particular product was new to me, but had been run before in our plant and the operator told me this was how the company had been doing this operation "for years."

 

I liked the ingenuity of using nails for registration pins, however, the type of nail being used was so soft they would only be truly in register the first time they were used.  As more pouches were cut, the nails became more and more distorted.

 

I went to the production manager and suggested they modify the design of the die to use steel nails, which were much stiffer and more resilient.  I explained the operators were getting injured from using the original die design and the aluminum nails were not helping us produce a consistent product.

 

The next day, I found the diecutting operation going a bit quicker, and the die boards now had steel nails instead of aluminum.  I asked the operators what they thought.  They told me the new "pins" lasted much longer and they didn't have to keep trying to bend the pins straight.  However, the pins were still nails and they still had sharp points.  People weren't getting hurt so easily, but they were still getting hurt.

 

Now I spoke with our plant engineer about the issue in our diecutting department.  Like me, he thought using nails as pins was resourceful, but still a long way from being a best-in-class die design.  He modified the pin system to incorporate spring-loaded steel pins with rounded tops.

 

When we introduced these to the diecutting department, the feedback from the operators was very positive and productivity improved.

 

I think the operators in this plant appreciated having someone come out to see how they were struggling with a poorly designed process.  Even though our first modification - from aluminum to steel nails - wasn't a complete success, it showed the operators someone was listening to them.  We reinforced that by getting more input from the operators, which led to our plant engineer's solution.

 

Another thing I found was that, when I went out into the production floor, the operators seemed much more helpful and friendly.  People opened up.  We talked about families, pets, hobbies - and about the processes we used to make our products.  One operator gave me a complete tour of her department - just because I asked "why do you do things this.....?"

 

Let there be no doubt about it, the people in the diecutting department knew they had a faulty process.  But management either wasn't listening or was just too cheap to do things the right way.  The employees were afraid to ask for improvements.  It just took someone from the front office going out to ask how things were going to get the feedback and drive some action to remedy the issue. 

 

Posted by Ronald Jamieson 

Employee Engagement: Making it happen for the Customer

I've mentioned unions before in previous posts, and how some folks find unions to be an obstacle to getting things done.  This week, I'd like to give you another example of a success story from a unionized plant.

At the first B2B manufacturing business I worked for, whenever our general manager was going to be away on vacation, he rotated the job of assuming his role among the members of the management group.

Eventually it became my turn to run the morning production meetings and coordinate production schedules and customer orders for a week. Things started out being very much a routine.

We had an order in house for a new product we were doing for the first time for a new customer my team had been developing.  It wasn't a complex product - just a foil lid for a major yogurt producer - but our production team encountered a serious problem.  The foil we had received to run this order had some significant quality issues that adversely impacted how easily we could run the product on our presses and downstream operations.  It wasn't something we could easily replace.  The lead time for this particular grade of foil was 16 weeks, and the customer's purchase order required it to be delivered the week I was in charge.

Our production manager suggested running the order on an older press that wasn't used much, but we had only a couple of operators who'd ever been trained on this press.  He suggested we ask for volunteers to put together a crew to run this order.

The union assisted us in assembling a crew for this old press and managed to finder an operator from among their membership who had once run this particular piece of equipment.

We met with the crew and explained the challenges to running the job and offered whatever help we could.  They agreed to give it a try.

Not only did they manage to run the order, we also managed to deliver it on time to the customer.  The order took longer to run than we would normally have planned, but the job needed to be run slowly so the press crew could maintain control over the substandard foil they were running.

At no time was the customer aware of the problems we had in producing their order.  The product ran fine on their lines.

At our next communications meeting, the management team recognized the crew who ran the yogurt lid job, and they got lots of cheers from their union mates - and a lot of respect from our management team.

In this case, the men on that crew wanted to demonstrate their skill in running a very challenging job.  None of them wanted to let the customer down.  They came through without the traditional union-management rhetoric.  it was just one instance in which union and management showed they could both be on the same side - the side of the customer.

 

Ron Jamieson

 

I'm a leader who transform businesses by igniting the sales and marketing teams to significantly grow revenue and profits by entering new markets, developing and launching innovative new products, and by forming strong alliances with customers and suppliers.

View my complete profile

 

Cracking Employee Engagement Through Leadership

Its tough to get employees engaged but, when you do, it’s worth its weight in gold… let me tell you a story about how I achieved this to great effect…

A number of years ago, back in my corporate career, I was asked to take over 20 call centers. The previous manager had been asked to move on, with good reason. He was a very poor leader. He thought management was about telling people what to do, measuring numbers and treating people as second class citizens. He was ‘old school’ and ran the place with a rod of iron. All this culminated in a poor performing organization whose people were demoralised. I remember finding out his office wasn’t even in the call centre - it was on the other side of town as he wanted more room! He rarely saw his people and when he did it was to simply shout and tell them what a poor job they were doing! 

His views of leadership and mine were very different.

My view of leadership has always been one of being inclusive. I believe everyone is equal, everyone should speak their mind, they just have a different job to do. Achieving consensus, though, can be very powerful. I outline my thoughts on leadership in this blog, 6 Secrets to Success. 

When I started I knew I had to break down the barriers between management and the teams. For example, I decided not to use the previous manager’s office; I worked at a desk with everyone else in the call center as I wanted to be accessible to everyone. I undertook the principles of MBWA, ‘Management By Wandering About’. This is not talked about much today but to get people engaged it is important to just spend time wandering around chatting to people.

As I got to know everyone I discovered some really great people who had a great deal of potential but they were being down trodden by the previous management, so I introduced a program I called ‘Releasing your potential’ to try and get over the message. The strange thing was even though I instituted a number of changes to ‘free the people’ they were not responding as fast as I had expected… I wondered why….team, team building 

One day I was in my back yard with my kids. That morning I had spent time erecting more fences so that when we let their rabbits out of their hutch they had the whole of the yard to play in. I was looking forward to seeing what the rabbits did. I had expected they would see the space they had to run about in and shout ‘Wahoo!” look at all this space! (or whatever the equivalent is in rabbit language!). But they didn’t. When I took them out of their hutch and set them on the ground they just sat there. I left them and went to sit back in my chair and watch them. They didn’t move!

After some time one rabbit took a few steps forward, and then a few more, as he started to explore the new area. The other rabbit, wandered back into the cage! I reasoned it must have felt safer there, somewhere familiar.

As I sat there looking at this unfolding before my eyes it came to me that the people in the call center were like my kid’s rabbits! There were a few of my team that were slowly embracing the changes and the freedom; they were taking a few tentative steps into the back yard. Many of the team, though, were waiting to see what was happening and questioning if I really meant all these things, deciding if they liked it or not, seeing what other people were doing before venturing one way or another. It was also obvious some didn’t like the freedom at all. Why? Because with freedom came responsibility. Freedom meant they needed to use their brains and take responsibility for their decisions. They liked it back in the hutch, where everything was certain. An example of this was when I started working in the call center, there would be a queue of people asking me questions. It’s not that they didn’t know the answer, in fact they knew much more than I did as I hadn’t managed a call center before. It was because they didn’t want to take responsibility for their actions. I quickly learnt to say, ‘Do whatever you think is right’. It was amazing to see people’s faces. They were stunned. They preferred to be told what to do; they preferred the hutch, life was simpler then but I had thrown their hutch or cage away. A couple of people resented it. It has to be said that some of these people didn’t make it through the transition. They left to find other cages to live in. Unfortunately there were still a number out there in other organizations!

Over the following months I continued with the ‘Realize your potential’ program. When people made mistakes I didn’t shout at them, I used it as a learning opportunity. I replaced the managers who were still ‘old school’. I took a gamble on one of the call center agents who I thought would make a good manager. She showed drive and commitment to make the change. That turned out to be a great decision. She is a great leader and has moved onto bigger and better things.

The team turned around. We went from the lowest results in employee satisfaction to one of the highest. The productivity of the team improved and most importantly our customers were happier. It’s simple really - happy employees give you happy Customers. Employee engagement and Customer Experience are twin bedfellows - you can’t have one without the other.

Change takes time. You have to realise that some people won’t make it. Some people prefer the cage. However, most people thrive in the freedom given, as long as they can see you are serious and your words match your actions. Some employees will blossom and then being a leader can be one of the most rewarding jobs out there.

How do you engage your employees?

 
Colin Shaw