All Posts by Employee Engagement Category

Employee Engagement

Mistakes Are The Best Learning Opportunities

by Peter Psichogios on 06/19/2013 14:38 0 comments , 435 views
Categories: Employee Engagement, Coaching & Mentoring, Leadership, Training & Development

As a reminder how mistakes impact a culture of engagement and enablement, please check out some of my favorite quotes and a cool infographic.

“While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, another is busy making mistakes and becoming superior.”
-Henry C. Link

“There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way and not starting.”
-Buddah

“Failure is only the opportunity to begin again, only this time more wisely.”
-Henry Ford

“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes”
-Oscar Wilde

“If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything. I’m positive that a doer makes mistakes.”
-John Wooden.

“The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.”
-Dale Carnegie

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”
-Scott Adams

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
-George Bernard Shaw

“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be ...

Not All Employee Turnover Is Bad

by Derek Irvine on 06/19/2013 07:20 0 comments , 143 views
Categories: Employee Engagement, Coaching & Mentoring, Social HR, Leadership, Management & Policy, Talent Management, Employee Benefits

Recognize This! – Some turnover is needed to ensure the best are able to excel in a strong, positive company culture and work environment.

Two of the most direct, measurable people metrics affected by strategic, social employee recognition are employee engagement and employee retention. Nearly all organizations I consult with cite improving retention as a primary ambition for creating a culture of appreciation through strategic recognition. But not all employee turnover is bad.

Jack Welch became somewhat infamous as “Neutron Jack” for his practices around removing low performers. But when you consider his focus, the perspective changes. In his own words:

“My main job was developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750 people. Of course, I had to pull out some weeds, too.”

As in nearly all things in life, a careful balance must be struck between employee engagement initiatives and employee retention goals. Some people simply need to move on from your organizations. Bullies should be fired outright. Some have grown as much as they can in the position you have available and can no longer contribute ...

Do Your Employees Quit and Stay?

by Globoforce Blog on 06/18/2013 20:22 0 comments , 439 views
Categories: Employee Engagement, Coaching & Mentoring, Social HR, Leadership, Talent Management, Employee Benefits

You might say that many in HR suffer from fear of abandonment. You monitor turnover rates. You create compensation plans to maximize employee retention. You do succession planning to ensure people have a pathway to develop within the organization. In other words, you pour a ton of effort and energy into ensuring people don’t leave.

The thought of employees quitting and leaving is scary. But here’s what’s scarier and more insidious: employees who quit and stay.

At a fundamental level, when employees become frustrated, discouraged or demoralized, there are often three coping mechanisms:

Proactively work to make the situation better. While this is the path we’d all like to think is the best one for employees, it can be a tough slog. It usually involves confronting people about the root causes of their frustration. It requires that the frustrated and discouraged employee exposes the fact he’s demoralized—often times to the very people who are the root cause of the morale damage. It’s the noble approach, but it’s not the easiest.
Quit and leave. This one’s pretty simple. At some point, people will decide that life ...

4 Ways Leaders Can Change An Organization’s Culture

by Tanveer Naseer on 06/18/2013 16:16 0 comments , 435 views
Categories: Employee Engagement, Coaching & Mentoring, Leadership

The following is a guest piece by Jon Katzenbach and DeAnne Aguirre.

It is striking to see how many chief executives see their most important responsibility as being the leader of the company’s culture. According to Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, “Culture is your company’s number one asset.” Her counterpart at Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, has said, “Everything I do is a reinforcement or not of what we want to have happen culturally.”

Recognizing the importance of culture in business is not the same thing as being an effective cultural chief executive. The CEO is the most visible leader in a company. His or her direct engagement in all facets of the company’s culture can make an enormous difference, not just in how people feel about the company, but in how they perform.

There are several things you can do from your highly visible position at the top of the hierarchy to spark and foster the cultural realignments you want to see:

1. Demonstrate the power of positive urgency
Time and again, we hear executives cite the importance of having a “burning platform” – a stress-producing crisis, whether externally driven or ...

The Impact And Criticality That Culture Plays On The Customer Experience

by Peter Psichogios on 06/18/2013 14:27 0 comments , 794 views
Categories: Employee Engagement, Leadership, Training & Development

Last month, I was interviewed as part of a thought leadership process at the West Coast Customer Experience Exchange.

Please watch on the following video to see an excerpt.

There Are No Fad Diet Quick Fixes for Strategic Employee Recognition

by Derek Irvine on 06/18/2013 13:58 0 comments , 361 views
Categories: Employee Engagement, Social HR, Leadership, Management & Policy, Talent Management, Employee Benefits

Recognize This! – Building and strengthening a culture of recognition requires consistent, daily effort and action.

Over cake with colleagues at a recent company celebration, I had an epiphany. Well, perhaps not an epiphany as this is a truth I’ve long known, but definitely an analogy worth sharing.

As we enjoyed cake and petits fours (they’re smaller, so fewer calories, right?), my colleagues shared their plans to “get into shape for swimsuit season,” as they called it. New Year’s resolutions for losing weight and getting fit were long passed, so now it was time to focus on the latest quick weight loss scheme – the newest pill, the craziest fad diet.

As we all joked together, I realized – this is what many companies do with employee recognition, motivation and engagement. They try the “quick fixes” – Pizza Party Wednesdays, Bagel Fridays, Employee of the Month, and my personal favorite: some form of peer nomination with a “winner” drawn from a hat.

Like the infamous grapefruit diet, these are all quick fixes. Just as no one can eat grapefruit every day for months on end, no strong company culture ...

NSA Snooping's Impact on Businesses and HR

by Joseph Fung on 06/17/2013 13:19 0 comments , 725 views
Categories: Employee Engagement, Social HR, Management & Policy

The news media and Internet have been sizzling ever since last week’s revelation by The Guardian and The Washington Post that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been tracking data from many U.S. phone calls as well as much of the world’s Internet traffic.

Amid retractions, corrections, denials, international concern, non-comments, and accusations galore, parsing through the implications of what exactly has been going on in both the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court system and the NSA’s “PRISM” program is an important and ongoing conversation for civil society.

For businesses, data vulnerabilities—whether via government security programs or corporate espionage by foreign nations—are a real and constant threat. But what’s to be done?

You could reject the cloud, unplug your computers, cancel your phone lines, and insist on only meeting people face-to-face in secure facilities. For the more practical among us, instead it makes more sense to simply take a few moments to consider in a very realistic way how government spying impacts your competitive position, and what new liabilities these ...

How would you like to learn the world’s biggest success secret in dealing with people?

by Peter Psichogios on 06/17/2013 12:06 0 comments , 599 views
Categories: Employee Engagement, Leadership, Training & Development

Would you like to learn a success principle that costs you nothing but the small amount of time it takes to use and can return dividends for you, your personal life and business career that can last a lifetime?

What would you pay me if I could give you an envelope with a secret formula for getting the most and best out of every interaction with every person?

How much do you think creating a positive experience with every interaction would mean to you personally and professionally?

Something that is guaranteed to get you more opportunities and more people who will help you get there.

So, you haven’t answered the question.

What would you pay for that secret formula inside of a sealed envelope?

How much would a guaranteed success formula be worth to you, your career and those you work with?

Would a guaranteed success formula be a little deal, a moderate deal, or a big deal for you?

Regardless of what you think, I’m here to tell you this success formula is a big deal. I’m also going to give you that envelope for free.

The one guaranteed success formula in dealing with people is acknowledgment!

Acknowledgement is a big deal.

More importantly, ...

Top 5 Employee Recognition Goals from the Latest WorldatWork Trends in Recognition Report

by Derek Irvine on 06/13/2013 16:11 0 comments , 495 views
Categories: Employee Engagement, Coaching & Mentoring, Social HR, Leadership, Management & Policy, Talent Management, Employee Benefits

Image Credit: WorldatWork “Trends in Employee Recognition 2013 Report”

Recognize This! – More and more companies are realizing the power of strategic employee recognition to reinforce and drive desired behaviors in the daily work of employees.

WorldatWork just released its 2013 Trends in Employee Recognition report. The timing is ideal, as earlier this week I blogged about the importance of behavior-based recognition and WorldatWork’s press release about the new report proclaims: “For the first time in the survey’s 11-year history, programs to motivate specific behavior jumped to a top-tier goal, cited by 41% of organizations in 2013 vs. 25% in 2008.”

Indeed, four of the top five recognition goals for organizations across industries are the focus of strategic, social employee recognition programs. The outlier (and still most popular program) is recognizing years of service. I believe this old standby remains at the top of the list because, even when companies find themselves in the toughest financial straits, leadership believes they must honor the loyalty of employees shown for years of service.

I, too, believe this to be ...