Steps toward Engaged Employees

Steps toward Engaged Employees

Hello & Welcome!

Today more than ever, organizations rely on the energy, commitment and engagement of their workforce in order to survive and thrive in the twenty-first century. Only 15% of employees worldwide are engaged in their jobs – meaning that they are emotionally invested in committing their time, talent and energy in adding value to their team and advancing the organization’s initiatives.

Employee disengagement costs the United States upwards of $550 billion a year in lost productivity. So, one could see why this is both a serious problem that most leaders and managers face with today’s workforce and also an amazing opportunity for companies that learn to master the art of engagement.

It is a common understanding of a vast majority of leaders that the employees are a company’s most important asset. But in reality, that is only true when the majority of the workforce is fully engaged in their work. If not, they are either adding minimal value or actively working against the organization.

The current business environment, and the world in general, is moving faster than it ever has before. 

Organizations across the globe are faced with more change than most can handle — in order to compete and dominate their segment they are required to grow faster often giving them less time to focus on managing all of their financial goals. They are forced to grow quickly with fewer resource - to do more with less. Leaders have to learn to excel in managing themselves, their teams and meeting organizational goals simultaneously.

The Leader’s Role in Engagement

Leaders improve engagement by defining and communicating a powerful vision for the organization. They hire and develop managers that are emotionally invested in the organization’s mission and vision and give them the resources to build great teams with the right people in the right roles. They empower.

Decisive steps to take for improving employee engagement & hone strategic action-takers in one’s organization:

Put everyone in the right role - Get the right people on the bus and make sure they are in the right roles. All talent acquisition and retention strategies have to be aligned with meeting company goals

Give Them the Training - No manager or leader can expect to build a culture of trust and accountability —and much less improve engagement — without setting the team up for success. Proper training removes future obstacles

Task Meaningful Work - Engaged employees are doing meaningful work and have a clear understanding of how they contribute to the company’s mission, purpose and strategic objectives. If you don’t sort those details out quickly, they will leave. Again, this is why they first have to be placed in the right role.

Check in Often - The days of simply relying on mid-year reviews for providing feedback are long gone. Today’s workforce craves regular feedback — which of course leads to faster course correction and reduces waste

Again, these principles are not complex, but must be prioritized. Companies that get this right will drive greater financial returns, surpass their competitors and easily climb to the top of “the best places to work” lists

Until next time - Visit us at 

https://www.theoneyearbreakthrough.com/ 

The Network Mantra

The Opposite of Networking is NOT Working

Hello & Welcome!

Becoming adept at networking takes time and effort. It requires that you do your homework and step out of your comfort zone--and many of us, even experienced executives, still have a hard time doing it well. As a business coach, I often remind people of the importance of networking. It's definitely worth the time and effort. But what if you're out there doing your best and it's still not working well for you? You could be making one of these five common networking mistakes.

1. Calling it in.

At its best, networking is done face to face. In an age when technology allows us to do nearly everything online, we need to remember that there's no substitute for getting out there and introducing yourself to someone in person. When you meet people, you get a better read on who they really are. Even if you feel you won't be good at social networking events, challenge yourself to get out there. Even if you talk to only one or two people, try to find common ground. However awkward you feel at first, with practice you'll soon become much more at ease.

2. Treating networking as a one-way street.

People may be connecting with you because they're genuinely interested in your ideas, but they're also there because they want you to listen to what they have to say. So, do not hog the conversation. Networking is about building mutual relationships, and there's no room for one-sided domination. Meet someone, get to know them, and let them learn to trust you and like you. That's what networking is all about.  

3. Taking before you give.

It's tempting to think of networking as a chance to make a pitch: "I'll find five people in the room and tell them what I need, and then I'll get it." But networking is built on give-and-take, and give always comes first. Start by taking note of who you'd like to meet. Then do some research if necessary and think of ways you can support and help them. Work on developing a relationship. When you do, you position yourself among successful people whose influence can help you go far. Build a reputation for being helpful in your network, and people will be keen to help you in turn. Answer when people ask for help, then go further to discover what they need and provide it proactively.

4. Focusing on quantity over quality.

Too many people treat networking as a numbers game, collecting contact information without getting to know anyone. This is a mistake I see over and over again. People act as if there's a prize for the one who collects the most cards or connections. But the real prize goes to the person who's able to make the most genuine connection, engage in the most relevant conversations, and create a memorable impression.

5. Failing to follow up.

This is the biggest and most common mistake of all. You go to an event and make some great connections, but you let them fade away without acting on them. Following up is the key to networking; without it, attending events and fostering connections is a waste of time. Create a specific plan for following up and do your part to steer promising new relationships toward mutually beneficial territory. Failing to follow up means a missed opportunity to develop a potentially meaningful and profitable connection.

Done right, networking is about building relationships and connecting. It should always be about giving before you receive and learning before you speak

The More Eliminator

Productivity directly related to Precise Focus

The More Eliminator

Hello & Welcome!

The key identifier of highly productive people is an absolute focus on activities that produce results, and then doing as many of those things (and only those things) as possible at any given time.

Entrepreneurs and sales people only get paid when their efforts produce revenue, not how busy they are, how many meetings they attend, how many emails they read, etc. 

Every activity has to contribute to a client paying for the product or service, or support closing a deal in a direct way. For them, the day doesn’t begin or end at a specific time, it ends when they have all their goals achieved for the day. There’s always one more call to make, or something else to be done. 

That is why they get so frustrated when other people waste their time - in their head they could be making money instead of whatever is in front of them. Everything is weighed as an opportunity cost. Time literally is money.

To get a sense of this, imagine if your current job only paid you if the activity you’re working on produced a tangible, measurable result: Not partial work, lines of code or pages written, emails sent, or “progress”, but actual finished product that is purchased by a customer - without a limit on how much money you could make. The flip side is that if you don’t hit a minimum threshold you’re fired. (If you are an entrepreneur, it means closing your business.) Nothing focuses your attention like having that type of pressure hanging over your head day in and day out.

We all get the same 1,440 minutes in a day. Once that minute is up, it is gone forever. There are some things you can multitask, but in general if you spend time doing one thing, you can’t work on something else. This is known as an opportunity cost. To be highly productive, you have to focus on the tasks that offer largest return on your time.

The question that highly productive people need to constantly ask themselves is:

“Is this the best use of my time right now?”

The most valuable opportunities are typically the ones you choose to do proactively, rather than reactive firefighting. In sales and entrepreneurship you have to be out ahead of the opportunities, anticipating your customers’ needs, generating demand by educating your customer, and most importantly you have to always be ahead of your competitors.

This splits the workday into tasks that can only be completed during normal business hours (like meeting with people face to face), and tasks that can be completed during off hours (administrative tasks, prep work, research, reports, contracts, etc.,) 

From 9am to 6pm, the goal should be to be face to face with as many customers, partners, suppliers, investors, industry insiders, and employees as possible, focusing on tasks that generate revenue or support activities that will generate future revenue.

Of course, all sorts of unplanned requests and tasks turn up all day. 

These are usually distractions and productivity killers, and productive people learn to quickly triage these. In general, the evaluation process looks like this:

·         Does this need to be done at all ?: You will never run out of things to do (especially as an entrepreneur), so what you say no to is just as important as what you choose to work on.

·         Am I the only person who can do this task?: Entrepreneurs often have a hard time delegating and want to do everything themselves, which just makes things worse for them. If you can effectively delegate a task, automated it, or outsource it, then move it off your plate.

·         How important or urgent is the task?: This determines priorities. Some “urgent” items are not that important, and some important items are not urgent. Ask yourself: Do you need to do it now, or can you work on it later? How long does the task take? Does it take 1 minute to complete? Does it have to be done during your valuable business hours (meaning it involves collaborating with other people in your time zone)?

This process will seriously cut the time wasters out of your day, and push the less important but still necessary items to “off hours”. Plan ahead and achieve highly successful results for your business.

The Resilience Developer

Build Resilience to Gain Engaged Employees

The Resilience Developer

Hello & Welcome!

It’s no secret that workplaces are dealing with what Gallup calls a ‘worldwide employee engagement crisis,' with four of every six employees on the payroll just collecting a check or worse, actively sabotaging the organization. To combat this, the conventional wisdom was to create a company culture around employee satisfaction by offering perks and benefits like child care, gym memberships, robust retirement plans, health insurance and holiday bonuses.

It turns out, those things didn’t produce engaged employees. Worse, in some ways, they encouraged the disengaged to stay on the payroll by adding what some workplace experts refer to as golden handcuffs.

As a Business Breakthrough Coach, I have developed more than 100 systems to solve many frustrations that entrepreneurs may have. Over the years, I have learned coping mechanisms that enable me to not only develop inherent skills and tools to discover and build a vision for businesses but also be in command of my professional abilities and transform lives for them to thrive successfully. 

The next evolution of chasing employee satisfaction in the hopes of increasing the ranks of the engaged was to offer flex-time and telecommuting. This strategy served only to give more opportunity to the disengaged to slack off because it reduced oversight, created silos and hampered cross-collaboration. Instead, the only real way to increase engagement is to build a culture not around perks and happiness, but around resilience.

Handling what comes.

Resilience is the ability to take complete control of your thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and actions, especially under pressure. Resilience is the skill to handle anything your life, and your job, throws your way. Resilience operates from a foundation of love and abundance, not fear and scarcity. Resilience turns negative stress into rocket fuel. Having it is the difference between being detached from your work or being engaged.

To date, the practice of management has been to treat the symptoms of defeatism and disengagement by applying Band-Aids to bullet holes. Trying to make your employees happier isn’t going to move the engagement needle. Happiness is fleeting for most people. Instead, we should be treating the root causes of disengagement by providing our employees with the mental and emotional tools to control their thoughts, feelings, attitudes and emotions, AKA resilience. 

First, understand how your employees’ brains work.

In the last decade or so, through cognitive and behavioral neuroscience, we have learned that the brain takes in approximately 11 million bits of information per second about what you see, what you feel, what you hear, etc. However, only a tiny fraction of those bits (about 126) go to the conscious mind to influence action. The key question is, how do people pick the 126 bits that get sent to the conscious mind?

Studies show that what we think, what we feel, our opinions, and our attitudes become the filter that chooses the 126 bits. We discard 99.99 percent of the information our brain detects and pick only the information that confirms our feelings, opinions and attitudes.

For example, if you think today is going to be an awesome day, your brain will go to work and find the exact 126 bits of information per second that prove your genius self to be correct. However, if you think today is going to be an awful day, your brain will go to work and find the exact 126 bits of information that prove your genius self to be correct. In psychology, it’s called confirmation bias.

Therefore, science tells us that a person who believes they can do something can do it and the person who believes that it’s impossible cannot. This defeatism and disengagement become a downward spiral that can spread throughout your organization, if you let it.

Clarify work expectations.

Miscommunication is a leading contributor to disengagement. Gallup data reveals that only 13 percent of employees strongly agree that leadership communicates effectively. No wonder workers are disengaged!

Leaders must first clarify their own thoughts and expectations about a task or project before they can expect their employees to. Strive to be more direct when giving assignments because the odds here indicate that you too have a communications issue that’s contributing to disengagement.

Promote positive coworker relationships.

Take a top-down approach to facilitating better co-worker relationships. Starting with the CEO and executive level. A full 62 percent of executives and managers alike are disengaged. No wonder the rest of the employees are! Become a good model for what workplace engagement, clarity of thought, enthusiasm, thriving mindset and communication should look like in leadership. Then, retrain the other levels of your staff.

Each of us, employee, manager, executive and CEO alike, all bear responsibility for our own resilience and engagement. The magic happens when we fully engage with ourselves and then persuade, influence and guide everyone in the organization, regardless of position or pay grade, to recreate that within themselves.

The Daily Me Enhancer

The 6 High Performance Habits that Make People Extraordinary

The Daily Me Enhancer

Hello & Welcome!

When we look at highly successful people, we often fall into the trap of thinking that they possess superior talent, intelligence or resources that we don’t have access to.

After a decade of researching and interviewing high performers, it had been discovered that all successful people share six common, consistent habits regardless of their area of expertise.

As a Business Breakthrough Coach, I have developed more than 100 systems to solve many frustrations that entrepreneurs may have. Over the years, I have learned coping mechanisms that enable me to not only develop inherent skills and tools to discover and build a vision for businesses but also be in command of my professional abilities and transform lives for them to thrive successfully. 

The Daily Me Enhancer is just such a valuable tool. It is our actions and habits that help us move forward in our lives. Once we have the clarity about what is truly important in our lives, we can overcome impasses by implementing these six habits that other successful people have used to achieve their goals and remaining engaged in the success and continued growth of one’s business/company. It is these habits that ultimately differentiate them from others.

The following are the six best habits that all of us can emulate to help us reach the next stage of growth in our lives

v Seek clarity. We need to figure out who we want to be, how we want to interact with others, what we want and what will bring us the most meaning in our lives. Every time we begin a new project we should ask ourselves: What kind of person do I want to be while I’m doing this? How should I treat others? What are my intentions and objectives? What can I focus on that will bring me a sense of connection and fulfillment? High performers continue asking themselves these questions every day; they develop a consistent routine of self-monitoring to make sure that their goals are always clear to them.

v Generate energy. To perform at a higher-level day after day we need to take care of our mental stamina (through frequent and intentional breaks), physical energy (through diet and exercise) and positive emotions (through controlling our thoughts). High performers know that they need to consciously generate energy so that they can maintain focus, effort and well-being. They know that they need to take care of themselves to stay on their A game.

v Raise necessity. We need to find and access the reasons why we absolutely must perform well. This necessity should be based on a mix of our internal standards (i.e. our identities, beliefs, values and expectations for excellence) and external demands. (i.e. social obligations, competition, public commitments, deadlines). We need to know our why and nurture the drive to transform our goals into absolute necessities.

v Increase productivity. We need to focus on prolific quality output in the area where we want to have the most impact. To do this, high performers minimize distractions and say no to opportunities that don’t help their quality output in their specific area of expertise.

v Develop influence. Success is rarely achieved in isolation; we need to develop influence with those around us. It’s crucial to have others around us that believe in and support our ambitions. High performers intentionally develop positive support networks because they know their achievements would be limited without the help of others.

Demonstrate courage. We need to stand up for ourselves and others even when we are faced with fear, change, doubt and threat. 
High performers consistently express their ideas and act every day. Ultimately, courage is not one bold action; it is a trait that we can choose to develop and use daily