CareerCurve™

Your employees are struggling to have faith in anything anymore. Most people are experiencing a loss of trust with government, the banking system, the housing market, big business – I could go on and on.

As an organization, what can you do to restore trust and faith? Trust is the guiding force behind motivation, engagement, retention and ultimately, productivity. Trust is earned through communication.

Communicate effectively and earn trust. Earn trust and in return you will get motivated (or even inspired) employees. Motivated employees are engaged and stick around. The result for your company? Productivity.

Thinking about it in this format (an outline, of course – you know how I love outlines) means you need to master step one. If you focus on effective communication, everything else follows.

So, how do you achieve effective communication?

Transparency.

But how can a company be transparent. Well it can’t be.   But the culture can. And as I’ve said before, character is to an individual what culture is to an organization.

How do you create a transparent culture?

1. Be honest.
   You don’t have to tell everybody everything but what you do tell should be the truth.
2. Be forthcoming.
   Share as much information, unprompted, as possible. Your employees will feel like they are part of something bigger and not only will this encourage trust but they will feel valued. For most, this is one of the top three things employees want from their company.
3. Don’t pretend to know what you don’t.
   Admitting your own limitations gives you credibility. People more easily trust those that don’t act as if they know everything. A little humility goes along way.
4. Define corporate values.
   Figure out what the corporate values are and share them with the employees. Making these values a priority helps get everyone on the same page. At the very least, make them understood. Gray area creates trust issues.
5. Follow through.
   If you don’t know something, get the answer. Or at least get the employee in touch with a person or resource who can get the answer.
6. Be consistent.
   Regarding corporate values, once they are defined, demonstrate them every day. Values should not be a list that are a lofty goal, they should be action that is visible in the way you work at all times.
7. Have opinions.
   Don’t be afraid to take a stand. Your opinions should align with the corporate values and you should be definitive in stating them. Stand firm.
8. Be open to other opinions.
   Here is another area where a little humility goes a long way. Be firm in your opinions but, be open-minded to changing them if a persuasive and logical reason is presented. Taking a definitive stand on something just because it’s always been that way stifles innovation and reduces the amount of trust your employees have in their superiors.
9. Be responsive and genuine.
   If you haven’t reached a solution, seek them out and tell them that. If you have, let them know as soon as possible what the results are. Don’t make them come back to you.

Transparency is an essential part of communication and effective communication will create an aligned,  happy and productive workforce.

I once spent a year (well, I really only made it 8 months) in a cubicle with a Judy-from-Time-Life headset on.  As I’ve mentioned before, I HATED this job.  I worked for a credit card company and my job was to provide exceptional customer service.  Now, I LOVE exceptional customer service.  I really like getting it, but what excites me even more, is giving it.  I’m a problem-solver by nature and I absolutely love a challenge – the harder the better – bring it on!  So why did I hate this job so much? 

It’s called Cognitive Dissonance.  This is a term used to describe that horrible, uncomfortable feeling you get when you are asked to accommodate ideas that conflict with your beliefs.  When I began this job, I was trained and lectured about how customer service was the foundation of our business model.  We were on a mission to provide the best service imaginable thereby gaining loyalty from customers and improved market share by branding ourselves as an organization that cared.  Perfect.  I know what good service is. 

But once we were placed in our cubes, those of us responsible for providing these fantastic customer experiences were paid garbage as a base salary and earned extra incentives (read, a lot of our salary) for how many calls we could take in an 8 hour day. 

Uh…okay.  What??? 

I’m supposed to be committed to solving our customer’s problems but I get paid more if I’m only on the phone for 70 seconds???  Needless to say, the transfer button became my best friend.  It only took me 10 seconds to move them along to another department thus improving my paycheck considerably, unless they took too long to state their question and oh, we had zero patience for that.  Do you think we felt good about the service we were providing?  Did we enjoy being placed in the us (paycheck) or them (customers) conundrum? 

And the effect of this in terms of productivity?  Do you think the customer’s experience was satisfying?  Do you think the customers loved my “How can I help you?” attitude? (Read sarcasm)  Did we successfully brand ourselves as a company that cared? 

Internally, I was one of the best Customer Service Reps in history (or at least one of the highest paid) but externally, I doubt my service was really much of a service to the customer.  

Beware!

Cognitive dissonance is prevalent in many organizations and the negative effects are huge.  Studies show that when confronted with these situations, the reasoning parts of the brain in charge of sound decision making actually turn off.  Emotions take over and the ability to think clearly and act with reason is impeded.   To cope, employees complain, procrastinate, and find ways to get paid back for the burdens they see as being unjustly placed on them.  In addition, dissonant messages snap any connection between the sender and the receiver.  The employees getting these messages become suspicious, lack passion, and don’t trust.   Cognitive dissonance will ultimately create cynical employees and a company full of cynics equals destruction in a company.  How can you possibly have an engaged workforce under these conditions?

Think about how you tell your employees you trust them but make them get three signatures from higher ups to make a purchase.  Think about working to convince them the company cares but when there’s a layoff, the company doesn’t provide any outplacement services.  Think about the message you send when you commend an employee for taking calls on a sick day but require 2 weeks notice and manager approval for a vacation day.

Is it time to focus on company values and use these to dictate the messages? 

What are some of your dissonant messages?  How can you align your organization’s values with the messages you send to your employees?

Bersin & Associates did a study ranking the 40 best practices that create an empowered enterprise.  The top 5 include:

1.   Leaders are open to “bad news.”

2.   Asking questions is encouraged.

3.   Decision-making processes are clearly defined throughout the company.

4.   Employees are frequently given tasks or projects beyond their current knowledge or skill level in order to stretch them developmentally.

5.   Employees have influence over which job tasks are assigned to them.

Interestingly, 4 of the top 5 best practices help build trust in your organization and as we all know, trust is a key factor in retention, engagement, motivation, and many of the other concerns faced by HR today.

What about your company?  Do you use these top best practices?  Do you have any others to share that leave a larger mark?  Do you have real life experiences of how operating this way has paid off?  If you do use these best practices, would you agree that trust in your organization is very high?  Please share in the comments.

The challenges facing HR executives today are huge.  You must be able to engage your employees, increase morale, gain trust in an untrustworthy economy, retain your top talent, optimize your workforce, and attract new talent in what is fast becoming a competitive job market.  And there’s more.

Another skill a successful manager requires is a way to create a sense of excitement with the employees so that deadlines are met and the team you are managing works together to accomplish the overall goals.  So how do you make them excited?

Going back to my mantra – COMMUNICATE!  If everyone is brought into the overall game plan of an organization you can then create excitement.  If you can lay out the long term goals of the company as a whole and generate excitement for the road the organization is on, you will see an increase in the excitement level of your employees.  This will help achieve all of the requirements I list in the first paragraph with an added bonus.  People who are excited are impatient.  Excitement creates a sense of urgency. 

Think about any situation where you really understand what you are trying to accomplish.  Let’s say you want to go on vacation.  When do you want to do that?  NOW!  As you backtrack through the process of what needs to take place to make that happen, how are you feeling?  Anxious to get started!  Well, I need the money so what am I going to do to get it?  Maybe I’ll clean out my house and have a garage sale, maybe I’ll sell a bunch of stuff on craigslist, maybe I’ll take side jobs, maybe I’ll redo my budget and cut some expenses so I can stash a few bucks a week.  I know though, that I will be excited to start, creative in thinking of ways to make it happen quicker, and highly motivated.

If you can relay to your team the passion and excitement of the future of the organization and they buy in, you will see all sorts of positive results.  Excitement is the key.  They will think outside the box to create solutions that will be more effective with quicker results.  They will be more motivated.  They will recognize their contribution and be anxious to display their value.  They will be engaged and will want to stick around to be there when the goals are met.  And they will want to do all this NOW!

All of these things lead to increased production and happier employees and this makes you a better manager.

I am very intrigued by the role (and havoc) that Social Media is playing in the workplace.  It would be very interesting to be able to compare the number of businesses that have been hurt by it versus the number that have been helped.  My gut tells me that if your organization is an ethical and fair place to work, there should be no fear.  If you have something to hide, watch out.  (Check out Drowned Rabbits)

That being said, you can’t please everyone all the time and there will always be a disgruntled employee out there ready to speak negatively about their company to anyone who will listen.  This has always been true, but social media sure broadens the reach and power these people have.

Unfortunately, it seems like the answer is to regulate, regulate, regulate.  I will go back to my previous post regarding trusting your employees.  How much money and effort should a company invest in trying to control that which is pretty uncontrollable?  There is no doubt that social media can cause a lot of problems for businesses.  But people are people and you cannot control what they will do. 

Don’t most people in the world understand that there will always be others who want to get a rise out of people?  It seems to me that this is not a new issue.  Only the vehicle with which to abuse company time and spread negative messages is new.  Most individuals will take corporate bashing with a grain of salt.  One well-known aspect of social media is a lack of reliability – you can’t believe everything you read.  What is the main issue from a manager’s point of view?  What employees are saying, or the time they are spending on the company dime to say it? 

I think another important consideration is the ability to do all this social media stuff on cell phones.  If it is on the computer at the office at least you can monitor it but if you try to prevent that, won’t people just use mobile devices? And then who knows what they’re doing or how often?

Do you work hard to control this or do you have faith that the company’s reputation will prevail?

I would think that one of the best solutions would be to have some guidelines that ask an employee to respect what they are being paid to do just like with email, surfing the net, and making personal calls.  Guidelines make you think, but a list of punishable offenses complete with threats of firing just creates ill will.  I have a friend who worked at an organization where the employees couldn’t even use Yahoo or LinkedIn.  Want to guess what the morale was like at that office?  I like the idea of “Give and You Shall Receive.  Trust and respect your employees and they will give you trust and respect in return.  (Here comes my idealism again.)  What if you allow them the freedom to participate in social media and they say all good things?  Now you’ve just done your organization a huge favor.  What does it say about a company whose employees like what they do and how they do it?

Another risk of restricting use is a passive aggressive revolt.  What if your employees join forces and form groups in social media where they go specifically to bash their company?  What if they let anyone join who wants to know what goes on there?  Negativity will just feed on itself and will hurt the company’s reputation and brand in the long run.

I’d love some comments from HR people who have to enforce strict rules as well as those who don’t have any at all.  I’d also love to hear any stories of successful management of social media.

Engagement and trust have been the subject of numerous posts now and it feels like everywhere I turn, this is being discussed.  I think that is because of the job evolution that is taking place – as the economy begins to turn around (we hope), those still employed are being challenged to fill different roles.  Managers are being challenged to retain their top talent and improve morale within the organization.   These circumstances make “engaging employees effectively” a very hot topic.  There are many differing opinions on how to go about achieving this goal of engagement (some of which I will mention below), but there is a definite consensus that it is mandatory for a company’s survival.  Engaged employees equal productive employees, and productive employees equal more money.

One of my favorite articles on this topic is 5 Ways to Ensure Mediocrity in Your Organization (and not just because # 1 on the list supports a couple of my previous posts).   I personally have a huge appreciation for witty and satirical writing (sarcasm is my friend), but great points are also made in this article.  Trust will make your company profitable. 

While researching for my previous post on trust and a lack thereof equaling disengaged employees, I read an article called No Trust and a quote at the end made quite an impression:  “People do not care how much you know, until they know how much you care.”  (This is often attributed to motivational speaker John C. Maxwell.)

Does the act of caring create engagement?

I then recalled an online discussion which began with the article What is Engagement All About.  As I read and made comments on what engagement is all about, a comment made by Kim Morgan, PHR, who is currently looking for work, really struck me.  She said “As a current HR professional in the job market, I had been floundering a bit with my purpose/strength; this discussion cleared my eyes to the fact that “engagement” is my strength. Perhaps because it is intrinsically interesting and obvious to me, i do not always recognize the importance of this skillset.”

Can engagement be a marketable skill?

Engagement is being thrown around all over the place as a state you would like to achieve with your employees.  But isn’t it true that engagement could also be a skill?  In today’s economy with employees’ morale low, their level of trust low, and their level of responsibility high, wouldn’t possessing the ability to engage be a very valuable and necessary skill?

I know that if I were looking for a good manager right now, at the top of my wish list would be the ability to connect, engage and build trust.

I posed some questions in my previous post regarding trust in an organization – how much it matters and what are the benefits.  As I’ve read other articles and participated in conversations on this subject it would seem as though it matters.  A lot. 

There have been some surveys recently that show that trust is very low right now out  in the workplace and that this is a dangerous trend that HR leaders would be wise to pay attention to.  This article references some of the issues that arise in an environment that lacks trust. 

One interesting point that is mentioned is the lack of trust not only between management and employees but between co-workers as well.  I hadn’t considered the impact of this in my previous post but it seems as though this trend can be just as dangerous.  It appears as though some companies actively discourage trust between co-workers to avoid unionization, which can result from a group trusting each other but not their managers.  The result  is decreased productivity. 

To discourage trust means that personal relationships in the workplace barely exist.  I suppose logic would show that less time spent on personal conversation means more work gets done.  I can’t buy into this though because happy people work harder.  Don’t they? If you don’t trust the people you work with, you don’t talk to them much and I would imagine when you need a break, you are more likely to waste time surfing the net, sending personal emails or calling your friends that you do trust.  None of this helps your company in any way. 

Is 15 minutes of personal conversation by the water cooler really that detrimental in the long run?  Wouldn’t personal relationships at work create more of a team environment where people ultimately work more efficiently?  When there is trust with your co-workers, don’t you use that time to talk about work anyway?  I know I do.  I  have personal conversations with the people I work with and they always end up being work related.  The difference is we are not chatting to complain or avoid working but just want to touch base and catch up.  We usually end up brainstorming and problem solving.  We are always trying to help each other do a better job.  Maybe the important thing to consider when assessing the role trust plays with co-workers is not to calculate the time spent in personal conversations, but instead to focus on what those conversations are about.

I have been following a few conversations regarding trust in an organization – how to instill it, maintain it, and how important is it?  I am of the mindset that I can deal with anything, as long as I know what it is I’m dealing with.  I highly value someone being “straight” with me, even if it is something I don’t want to hear.  Actually, ESPECIALLY if it is something I don’t want to hear.  It has to be hard though, for the person who has to relay messages from higher ups, to create and build that trust within a company.  How can you be trustworthy when the message you are delivering is not necessarily your own?  Also, you may not have a say in how much information is distributed.  Your job may be to provide certain pieces of information while withholding others and that is not conducive to trust.

In order to get trust you have to give it, and while you may be privy to certain things that are going to affect your coworkers, you may be required to keep these details to yourself.  How is it possible to have both – do your job the way you are supposed to but still work with a team that trusts you and what you say?   As an employee, I think it is possibly the most important part of a fulfilling career.  In my opinion, an environment of honesty has a wonderful domino affect.  Believing in your boss allows you the opportunity to show the same to your employees.  This instills loyalty, hard work, and a strong work ethic.  This is all assuming I am not in the minority in appreciating the truth, whether good or bad. 

Is trust that important?  Are there genuine benefits to focusing on this in an organization or is our society too skeptical and cynical at this point for it to matter?