Don't Ask The Question If You Don't Want to Deal With the Answer

I'm a consultant. Business owners come to me for advice. They don't always like the answer I give them. But it's their company--they don't have to use that advice. And that's OK. I reserve the right to do the same in my own company.

This happens to me when doing audits as well. When a company asks me to do any type of an audit, I always ask, are you sure you want to know? Because if you know something is not right, you have an obligation to fix it. If you are going to ignore what you find, then don't audit. You can at least plead ignorance. But once you know, it's hard to convince a government agency you were operating in good faith.

I was meeting with a group of people today to discuss employee engagement surveys. One of the people asked, "So, what if a company does the survey, and they fail?" Well, first, taking a survey and getting a poor result is not failure....if you use the information you get to make improvements. Companies only fail if they ignore the answers they get.

It's the same with employee satisfaction or engagement surveys. If you ask employees for their feedback, you can't ignore it. If you do, the employees figure you were just pretending to care what they think and the result is a further decrease in satisfaction and/or engagement. When you take these surveys, there are going to be negative responses. It's a given. No one and no company is perfect. However, you do need to go back to the employees and say, "Okay, here's what you liked and what you didn't. These are the specific issues we are going to tackle in the near term because they seemed to be the biggest concerns." Then get them involved in fixing the problems and keep them apprised of what is happening. Just the knowledge that the company listened and is trying to improve has a significant positive impact on employee motivation.

It's a waste of your time and your employees' time to ask them to complete a survey and then ignore what they tell you. If you don't want to know and don't want to take action, just don't ask in the first place.

The purpose of an audit or an employee survey is to make your company better. Properly used, these tools can not only improve compliance and engagement, but they can help you get better results in terms of profit--a win/win in my book.

Winning the War for Profit

Warning! This post contains shameless self-promotion, as well as a modicum of useful information.

In an earlier post, I talked about leadership training as often pursued by companies, versus leadership training that actually works.

I recently released a short eBook (paperback to follow in a few months), Winning the War for Profit: Developing Leaders Where It Really Matters, that contains a roadmap to leadership development at the first-line supervisor level, as that is the place where (in my opinion) it can do an organization the most good.

Here's a short excerpt from the book that highlights why I think this is such an important topic:

"Here are just a few other reasons to focus on your supervisors:

• The right managers contribute 48% more profit than average managers (Frontline Managers, 2014)
• Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. (Beck, 2014)
• Businesses say that manager and supervisor involvement was "extremely important" or "very important" to the success of their change efforts (Manager/Supervisor's Role in Change Management, 2016)
• Total Return to Shareholders (TRS) over a 3-year period is 286% higher for those companies with a high level of employee trust versus those with a low level of trust, according to Watson Wyatt.
• Ninety-one percent of employees rated their relationship with their immediate supervisor as "very important" or "important" to their job satisfaction. (SHRM, 2016)

"If you are still stuck on the first bullet, you should be. That statement, by itself, should justify every penny of investment you make in your supervisors." 

Winning the War for Profit shows businesses how to select, train and support first-line supervisors. The information is transferable to leadership development at all levels of the organization, but there are some unique aspects to that first leadership rung, so I wanted to focus on that.

The next book, Leadership in the Trenches: Developing Your First-line Leadership Ability, will be focused on the specific skills required by first-line leaders and will be useful for organizations to use in their training programs or for first line supervisors to use independently. Look for that book around 1 October.

You can find Winning the War for Profit on Amazon.

Trust and Face-Time

I was speaking at an HR conference last week on the subject of managing change. In that talk, I talked about the importance of trust in getting employees to adopt change.

In the Q&A at the end of the session, one of the attendees asked, "How can one get employees in remote locations without regular interaction with management to trust the management team?" My response? "Facetime."

I know we have gotten into the whole virtual workplace theme. I interact with my clients mostly in a virtual environment. But I have met all of them, in person, usually more than once.

We've probably all heard the sales maxim that people buy from people they trust. In order to trust them, they have to like them, and to like them, they have to know them. The same is very true with employees and trust. If employees don't see management, they cannot develop trust in management, and if they don't trust management, they are unlikely to buy into the change.

This is one of the big reasons first line supervisors are so important--they are the accessible face of management. But let's not get me on that soapbox this morning. The old "Management by Walking Around" rule applies in today's workplace every bit as much as it used to. Perhaps even more, as workers are seeing their management less and less all the time.

Yes, your job is busy. At a point not too long in my past, I took over a work group of about 350 people that were spread out in several buildings. The tendency is to stay in the building where your office is located. I made it a point to visit every workcenter on a regular basis and to talk to every single person there when I went by. And to make sure I did it, I appointed someone to hold me accountable.

The visits weren't long. Initially, the employees were completely thrown off by management in their area. It was obvious that it was not something they were used to and when it happened, it wasn't a good thing. It took several weeks for them to relax and some months before they would actually bring up and discuss problems and make suggestions. They had a chance to ask "why" about policies and procedures from the person who made/approved them. I don't think it is enough just to glad-hand your employees (except maybe the first time.) Be interested; ask questions; recognize good work.

This simple, but regular, action was part of the reason this group gelled so well and actively pursued better ways of doing the work. In the case of the person in my conference session, to visit her group required overnight travel. So you don't see them every week, but you have to make it a point to see them occasionally. In between, yes, other forms of contact help reinforce the relationship.

My point? Get off your butt and walk around. Even if it's a long walk.