Rodd Wagner's Blog, page 7

People Join Companies, But They Sometimes Leave CEOs

There’s an old expression associated with employee motivation that says, “People join companies, but they leave managers.” But that’s only partially true, because what each of those managers does and how much each of their employees responds depends heavily on the vision, dedication, humanity, and hard work of the company’s chief executive.

Read the full story from Chief Executive magazine.

Who Lets the Dogs In?

Today is Take Your Dog to Work Day. It might seem a silly exercise, but increasingly you can tell a lot about a company from its stance on whether dogs can come to the office. My Forbes column on the subject can be found here.

If you have a great dog-at-work story, please email it to me. I might use it in a future column or the next book.

Leadership Lessons from a U.S. Navy Submarine

Imagine you had to stay with your 130 employees for seven months straight. Underwater. Half a world away from your family. For most of us, it would not end well.

A leader able to not just get by under those circumstances, but create high levels of morale and accomplishment has something to teach the rest of us.

A week ago, I was fortunate enough to augment what I’d written in Widgets about the leadership lessons of submarine officers with an “embarkation” aboard the Virginia-class attack sub USS California. I had an opportunity – during breaks in his command responsibilities – to interview the captain of the boat, Commander Eric Sager (pictured above) and members of his crew.

The account can be found here on Forbes’ web site.

New Forbes Column – “From Chiat to Hsieh: Pulling the Little Red Wagon of the CEO’s Goofy Idea”

So far as we know, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh never met legendary ad man Jay Chiat. Yet somehow, the little red wagon of goofy management ideas got wheeled from Chiat to Hsieh. The same style of misplaced utopianism foisted on the employees of ad agency Chiat/Day, before it was sold, is now being inflicted on the people at Zappos.

It won’t end well there either. . .

(Read the rest at Forbes.com)

The Consultants’ Crusade Against Happiness

Only in the consulting world could happiness be bad.

The idea that making employees happy is good for business makes some people in the “engagement” industry bristle.

Equating engagement and happiness “makes my ears ring and my mouth twitch,” FORBES contributor Maren Hogan wrote last year. “There’s no proof that happy employees will do anything great for your company,” she asserted. “While I don’t want to deny employees happiness, I’d rather have engaged employees.” . . .

(Read the rest at Forbes.com.)

The End of “Employee Engagement?”

I’ve signed on as a contributor to Forbes.com. My first post, “The End of ‘Employee Engagement?'” can be read here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/roddwagne...

We Must Regain Our Humanity at Work

My ChangeThis “manifesto” (that’s what they call them) was released this week. You can download it here. It starts like this:

Something happened over the last decade, and it wasn’t good for business or employees. More accurately, some things happened, and they’ve combined in a way that makes the workplace more impersonal.

We’ve lost much of our humanity at work.

No one saw it coming. No one intended it.

It arrived in big changes to the economy, but also in small changes to the law, to technology, or to company policy, often with immediate benefits that masked their larger implications. The pension will be phased out in favor of a 401(k) match. The company will help pay for the latest digital device, so much the better to stay in touch with the office. One day a new electronic screening system helps HR take a first pass at incoming applications, and before long the software does most of the sifting. A modest change in workload leads to working through one weekend, which leads to another, which leads, before too long, to having a hard time remembering when one last took a weekend entirely uninterrupted by work.

Having allowed these slight modifications to accumulate over a decade or so, we now find ourselves treating people much more like cogs in the machine, like widgets. We’ve lost much of the human touch for what we now call our ‘human resources.’ Whether a company gets it back will largely determine its future.

To read the full “manifesto,” please download the free PDF at the ChangeThis site. You do not need to provide any personal information to get the download, and you are welcome to circulate it as you see fit.

“Mark Five to Survive!” Why Your Old-School Engagement Program Is Destroying Engagement

You could call the following a hypothetical situation. Except that it’s not.

It describes the dilemma faced by millions of employees every year who are not well supported on their jobs and are then faced with an old-school employee survey. Watch the video here or read the parallel written piece that follows, then ask yourself how often this happens at your company.

The best example I can give of what’s wrong with current employee engagement processes would be to imagine someone goes to work for a company. Let’s say he’s a good person. He’s a hard worker.

But let’s say that he falls into a situation where he does not have the world’s greatest manager – his manager largely ignores him, doesn’t take him to coffee, doesn’t talk to him often.

It might be an organization where there’s not a tremendous amount of transparency, where there’s a certain amount of fear, where there’s not much recognition or sense of accomplishment . . . you can go on down the list.

Now let’s say this organization decides that, “We’re going to do a survey. And we would like your honest opinion about how you feel in this job.”

When he goes to take the survey, there’s a good chance the questions are either weak or dated or some combination thereof, but let’s say he fills it out very candidly. And if they ask him whether he’s gotten recognition, he says “Strongly disagree, I haven’t gotten recognition.”

Does your manager spend time with you? “I strongly disagree. That hasn’t happened.” He’s simply reporting the facts.

When he hits submit on the survey – on most surveys – it says, “Thank you for taking the survey.” That’s it. There is nothing that says what will happen with it. Even though he’s answered some very sensitive questions, he really doesn’t get anything in return at that point.

A few months later, if he’s lucky, he will see some type of a report that will come back from the organization that conducted the survey. In some cases, the number of people on the report will be as low as four or five, which means that the ones or twos he put on the survey – the “strongly disagrees” or “disagrees” – are apparent. It’s apparent from the averages that someone gave some really low answers.

If his manager is being bonused based on the level of engagement inside that workgroup, the employee, through his answers and through no fault of his own, may have cost his manager several thousand dollars in bonus. His manager may be angry and decide that now he’s going to retaliate in some form: “You want to play that way, let’s see how your job goes for you.”

Some of the people who conduct these surveys go so far as to say the people who are “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” are, in fact, as one company says, “more or less out to damage the company.” So now his integrity is being questioned, that he’s going to be much less vigilant against theft, that he may himself steal from the company, that he may mess with the equipment, that he is, as one organization says, “working to tear down the work of his more engaged colleagues.”

Now they’re saying his candid answers reflect a character flaw, essentially, “Even though we, as a company haven’t provided you with everything that you really ought to have as an employee, when you tell us that you don’t like it and you report back, you have a character flaw. You are a bad employee for not saying that everything is just fine.”

All of those things happen to some degree or another in most traditional employee engagement surveys. In some cases, people will even advise their colleagues, “Just put a five – strongly agree,” “Put a five to survive. Put a five to survive, Baby!” or “Just lie on the survey, because it’s going to cause you a lot of problem down the line if you’re honest.”

If you think about that, it’s kind a contaminated process. It’s disrespectful. It’s counterproductive. It’s an absolute waste of the organization’s money. And so we need to get ourselves back to the point where, if we’re going to ask an employee how things are going, we need to be comfortable with him being candid, one way or the other.

Until we get to that point, there’s no reason to do an engagement survey at all. I would argue that a survey done in the way I’ve just described actually does more harm than it does good, both to the employee and to the company.

 

Want to find out how your job compares with those of everyone else in the United States? Go to www.iamnotawidget.com and complete the free New Rules self-assessment. It takes about four minutes. You get your results back immediately after you hit submit. And you have no reason to “Mark five to survive!”

Five Questions About “Widgets” in Less Than Six Minutes

It’s Madness to Agonize Over “Productivity Lost” to the NCAA Tournament

Now that your March Madness bracket is in shreds, let’s look briefly at the more important leadership issue that will remain long after Kentucky wins the title.

How does your company feel about the threatened loss of productivity from employees paying attention to the NCAA tournament during working hours? After all, many of the games are being played during working hours. If workers block out the games to focus on their work, smartphones and tablets send alerts every time there’s an impending upset. One can watch the games on any connected device. And office pools – official and otherwise, legal and borderline – proliferate.

The madness “is a productivity killer at the office. The lost time employees spend crafting brackets, streaming games or checking scores, could reach $1.9 billion,” reported the Indianapolis Star.

The dollar figure comes from what’s become an annual press release from an outplacement firm that uses the gimmick to get itself in the news. “There are distractions every day at the office,” U.S. News quoted the firm’s CEO saying, “but the first week of the annual men’s college basketball tournament is particularly hazardous to workplace productivity.” Some employee engagement consultancies, the ones who argue your employees are your enemy, quote, tweet, and retweet the number to get some of the attention for themselves.

The math behind the alleged theft of company time is simple, but imprecise. Estimated number of people participating times how much time they are distracted from work times their average hourly wage equals total “lost productivity.”

The first problem with this line of thinking is that it’s outdated. It’s based on an industrial view of humans, that they are machines, robots, whose value is in how many hours of production they produce. The assumptions are widgety.

In some jobs, this still holds. If an employee is processing chicken moving down a conveyor belt, the company is essentially buying that person’s time on station. Same deal if an employee is working the register at a retail store. But few of these people can peel away much time to be watching streaming games or comparing their brackets with everyone else’s.

The jobs that have enough flexibility for a person to be keeping one eye on University of Alabama at Birmingham vs. Iowa State are those that are also most likely to require people get certain things done, regardless of the hours it takes and whether that work happens at the office or at home. An enterprise can’t simply count the work lost to March Madness during the day without also counting the work gained when an employee continues to work that evening at home while sitting in front of the TV keeping an eye on the game, or the weekend and evening hours spent replying to emails that did not get answered during “regular business hours.” By one estimate, 80 percent of employees are spending the equivalent of an extra day a week working for their company during what used to be called “off hours.”

The more fundamental questions are whether a company’s leaders have made work there fulfilling enough that it competes with any potential distraction, and whether those leaders trust the maturity and professionalism of their employees enough to let them make their own best judgments about how closely to follow the games.

If the answers to those questions are iffy, the company has much larger problems than people’s interest in a little college basketball.