In this rapidly changing world, one of the keys to being a successful leader is to be adaptable with a strong willingness to learn and change. A few of the powerful changes that are impacting today’s leaders include: technology; workforce demographics – the baby boomers are beginning to leave the workforce and a new workforce that has different values, skills and connection to work are taking the boomers place. Marketing that was directed to the masses versus today’s social marketing that is focused on making a strong “connection” with a few. Instant on-line access to just about anything you desire. The need for speed, urgency, efficiency and effectiveness that by-passes the traditional channels to get things done.

How effective are you as a leader in learning new ways to adapt to the changes? Can you make a list of 10 things you have learned to do differently this year? In our seminars on leadership and change, we teach the four stages leaders go through when making a personal change. Learning how to change, and change quickly is a critical skill for leaders in today’s workforce. We live in a change or become obsolete world. Below are four stages of change that will help you make the necessary transitions that are required to be a leader today.

Stage 1: Unaware
J. Paul Getty once said, “In times of rapid change, experience may be your worst enemy.” In this stage, the leader did not even know that changes were taking place that might impact them or their organization. We call this stage the unconscious incompetent stage. They did not know and they did not know they did not know.

Stage 2: Awareness…then Denial
Back when I first heard of sites like Twitter and LinkedIn. My initial thoughts were…great, but it has nothing to do with my business or me. Worse, one day I thought to myself, “the people on those sites have way too much time on their hands.” If these types of comments do not demonstrate my ignorance and resistance to change, I said, “fine, but my clients are not going to be using these social media sites.” I was officially aware, but just in major denial. If leaders are going to seek out any information in this stage, they tend to seek out only the information that confirms what they already believe…that this change will not work. It has been said that if you can argue long enough for your limitations, eventually they will be yours.

Stage 3: Exploration
In Stage 3, leaders start to open their minds to the possibility of change. Although Stage 3 and exploration is a good thing, the challenge is usually people are jumping on the wagon late in the change cycle. Yesterday at the gym, I saw a man carrying around a CD player. CD players were good in their day, but he should explore streaming music from his phone, or at least an iPod or MP3 player.

Stage 4: Acceptance and Commitment
My father once told me, “In a fight between you and the world, bet on the world.” As we discuss acceptance and commitment, it is important to note that at least one person reading this is probably thinking this thought: not all change is good change. We are the first to agree…not all change is good change. All of us can cite hundreds of examples when change has occurred and it has not been good. But, what is important to note is that not one improvement can be made in your organization or department without a change occurring. It is in this stage that for the first time, people can see a positive vision of the change working for them and benefiting their life.

So how have you changed as a leader over the last 12 months? Have you…
• Clarified and communicated your vision and goals
• Incorporated new technology into your life to become even more productive and efficient
• Raised the bar on accountability and results for your team?
• Became an even more effective communicator
• Balanced your work and personal life…and encouraged your team members to do the same
• Learned something new…and then taught what you learned to others
• Taken on a new project or task…that makes you and the team uncomfortable
• Celebrated your successes of how you and your team have changed

When it comes to change, we are fond of saying, “you can change…or you will be changed.” General Eric Shinseki, former US Army Chief of Staff, stated, “If you don’t like change, you are going to like irrelevance even less.” So it is time to get to work. Can you come up with a list of 10 ways you have significantly changed in the last year? Good luck!

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Our clients are wise to consider the impact of turnover, even if it is not currently impacting their organizations. In a recent study commissioned by AFLAC and conducted by Research Now in January and February of 2012, it was revealed that 49% of employees surveyed reported that they are at least somewhat likely to look for a job in 2012. Of even more concern to employers, a majority of those who said they were either likely or extremely likely to look for work elsewhere, described themselves as a hard worker (90%); a high achiever (79%); highly educated (73%) or ambitious (64%). In other words, these are just the employees that employers need to keep to remain viable and competitive.

While the basis of the AFLAC study dealt primarily with employees’ perceptions about their benefits. Workers who were extremely satisfied or satisfied with their benefits were nine times more likely to stay with their employer than those who were dissatisfied with their benefits. Other important trends were also identified:

– 35% of workers who don’t believe their company has a reputation as a great place to work indicated they were likely to leave in the next 12 months

– 33% of workers who don’t believe retaining employees is an important priority for their employer say they are likely to leave

– Workers who are stressed out are more likely to leave than workers who are not stressed (43% vs. 25%)

– 28% of employees who say they are extremely likely to leave their job in the next 12 months say they don’t have peace of mind

This research is current and conclusive. While no one knows precisely where our economy is going, there are enough prevailing indicators for employees to begin thinking about their exit strategies. While many employees are happy to have a job after the great recession, many are tired of being a part of a strategy that focuses more on your bottom line and survival and less on the employees that ensured your survival. Having weathered the worst, many employees are now beginning to ask, “What’s in it for me?” and think about their future opportunities and growth potential elsewhere.

Based on our experience and the quantifiable data evident in our surveys, what employees tell us matters most to them these days is:

– Working with good team members and a good boss

– Being able to contribute their ideas and opinions and have a say in the work they do

– Being recognized for their contributions to the team’s success

– Feeling like they are a valued, important team member

– The ability to learn and grow in their jobs

– Doing work that matters… work that is meaningful and challenging

– Working in a trusting environment where they are empowered to complete their work to the best of their ability

– Having flexibility in where they do their work, when they do their work, and how they dress when they do their work

During these uncertain times, do you really know what your employees are thinking about you? When the opportunity presents itself, will they stray, or stay with you? Make engagement and retention critical organizational goals as you move forward. If you don’t know what’s on the minds of your employees, how will you know when they are designing their exit strategy?

There’s never been a better time to conduct a survey and identify reality from your employees’ perspectives. Find out what they like and what concerns them. Communicate the results of the survey to your team members, along with the corrective actions that you will take, based on the outcome of the survey. You can’t afford to lose touch with what’s really important to your most valuable asset, your people.

The post Do You Know Who’s Planning Their Exit Strategy? appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

There are so many factors that affect an employee’s level of engagement. If you only ask questions that measure engagement you won’t be able to fully identify the current problems that are hindering engagement, and the data that you collect could be limited, causing you to miss the bigger picture—the pulse of the whole organization. If you are going to invest valuable resources in surveying your employees, ensure that you are asking the right questions and getting the full picture, not just the engagement number.

We find that clients who only ask about engagement levels or conduct short 10 question surveys to gain a quick read, end up having to follow up with focus groups to gain more information on the reason behind the scores. So, what is the right number of questions to include in your survey? Well, there isn’t a right number or a one size fits all. It really depends on your organization and your current culture. We always encourage our clients to go beyond engagement and ask questions that will provide great insights into their team members’ thoughts about work flow processes, bureaucracy, systems, and their working relationship with management, to name just a few topics.

So, what does going beyond engagement look like? Adding more than engagement questions to your survey. Below are some tips for what to include and steps to take when designing your next Engagement Survey. This will ensure that you gain the ‘full picture’ and achieve complete, detailed data, allowing you to take action to address employee concerns.

1. In the survey design phase, interview your employees to gain a clear picture of what they believe to be your organization’s strengths and areas of concern. In our experience, we design the most successful and meaningful surveys by talking to people at all levels within the organization. Employees can give you the best insights into your organization’s culture. By including them in the design phase, not only will you create better questions, you’ll have a group of employees that will help you market the importance of taking the survey that they have helped design.

2. Ask questions related to your strengths as well as areas in which you can improve. Organizations can get so focused on what is not going well, that they forget to include questions about their strengths. Clearly identifying your strengths will give you a chance to celebrate your success and continue with these best practices.

3. Ask questions about the systems, processes, work flow, or the organizational bureaucracy. Asking questions of this type will ensure that employees are not encountering daily roadblocks in their work. When employees are consistently challenged by these roadblocks, it is easy for them to become disengaged. For example, some common roadblocks that can be discovered in surveys are: policies and procedures that are in place but are either no longer needed or can be done more efficiently; hiccups in the systems; duplicate processes or redundancy; and clarity of goals. If you are able to find out what these challenges are and then remove them, employees will be able to do their work more effectively, resulting in higher levels of engagement.

4. Ask questions about how successful the organization is at solving problems. Sometimes organizations are good at identifying problems, but not solving them. Other times, both may be an issue. Including these types of questions will help you identify areas in which a lack of effective problem solving may be hindering employee engagement and morale.

5. Last, ask questions about cross-departmental communication. In this current economic climate, we find that most organizations are struggling in this area. Some of our clients report that they are working leaner, more efficiently and adding staff cautiously. Because of this, team members are working harder, and there are fewer of them to do the job. Combine this with today’s 24/7 business expectations, and some departments may become focused solely on their own survival. Priorities outside of their own department become secondary, and breakdowns between teams occur, negatively impacting the organization as a whole. Over time, employees experience the frustration of teams appearing to work against, not with, one another, and levels of engagement are impacted.

We encourage you to not shortchange your survey by asking only engagement questions. Utilize your survey to its full potential by asking a wide range of questions to give you an all encompassing read of your organization’s culture. What’s the right number of questions to ask? It all depends on what you want to know.

What are your thoughts on this?

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We’ve been conducting employee engagement surveys for the past 22 years. We know emphatically what works. We also, along the way, have become outspoken about what doesn’t work. While we are typically optimistic and persistently positive in our advice, today we are switching our approach and will share with you what doesn’t work.

This topic was prompted by a recent discussion with a potential survey client during the proposal phase. We opted not to proceed with this partnership when they told us that they would not be sharing their data with anyone outside of the senior leadership team. Their premise was that managers, supervisors and employees wouldn’t know what to do with the information. For us, that approach was a red flag for a doomed survey. We opted to dissolve our partnership before proceeding any further.

Based on our experience with what does work, here is a list, in no particular order, of what doesn’t work when conducting surveys with employees:

Senior Management is Not on Board:

When senior management sees the survey process as strictly a function of HR, the survey will fail. There will be no vested interest in the success of the survey, and no commitment to doing anything with the results. If senior management cannot support the survey initiative, you will need to campaign, negotiate, and use your influential skills to sell the benefits of the survey to them. If you can’t persuade senior management to get behind the initiative, it’s best to delay conducting a survey until prevailing attitudes change.

Response Rates are Low:

When clients ask us how many people within the organization should take the survey, we respond, “Everyone.” When response rates are low, the next question is, “Did only the unhappy people take the survey?” Who knows? Low response rates provide every opportunity to discount the data as not being credible, or not being representative of the entire workforce. What’s an acceptable response rate? We aim for 100%, but are happy with a response rate of 80% or more.

The Survey is Complicated or Confusing:

While we advocate getting a cross-representative team involved in developing your survey, survey development by committee can lead to an unwieldy survey instrument. Questions can be double-barreled, or measure two different things. Both negatively worded and positively worded statements are intermingled in the survey. Different rating scales are used. Although this makes for a more interesting survey, it leads to confusion and frustration on the part of the survey taker. It also may provide mixed results, as participants have interpreted the questions differently.To ensure success, the survey must be easy to read, understandable, simple and straightforward.

The Data is not Broken Out for Ownership:

Everybody gets everything, company-wide, but nobody knows who owns the data. Supervisor A, in reading the data, rationalizes that the lower rated questions belong to Supervisor B. Supervisor B, on the other hand assumes the opposite… it’s Supervisor A’s team that is unhappy. There’s no way to associate specific data with specific supervisors, managers, departments, divisions, etc. because the data is only processed at a very high level. While anonymity is ensured, accountability is not. No one owns the data. It’s easy to point fingers and blame others, because the data is not specific to a particular leader.

Survey Results are not Timely:

The longer you wait to get survey results into the hands of employees, the more they assume that the results will mean bad news. Even worse, don’t give them the results at all, then, sit back and watch the speculation begin. The gossip about how bad things are surpasses reality because it is so much more interesting to talk about. Remember, the results won’t be a surprise to employees. Because employees typically comprise approximately 80% of the survey respondents in your organization, they know reality. When should you get the results to employees? As soon as you can. A good time frame for this is no later than 30 days after senior management has reviewed the data.

There is No Follow-Up:

The employees receive the data, but nothing further is done with the data. No action planning takes place. No one is held accountable for making improvements based on the survey results. And possibly, no mention of the survey is made again until it’s time to survey employees again. If you don’t follow up on your employee engagement survey, don’t be surprised when you see the participation rate on the next survey go way down, along with the overall favorable response. Employees will have a prevailing sentiment of “Why bother? Nothing will be done about the survey.” In this situation, of course, the employees are right.

The Data is Used to Punish People:

A surefire way to derail a successful survey is to use the data punitively. Data used to play gotcha will demoralize more than just members of the leadership team: the collateral damage will affect the employees as well. When employees see people being fired or ostracized for their data, they will become hesitant to ever participate in another survey. Successful surveys are not used to punish a leader, but rather to draw attention to areas where the leader could take action to change employee perceptions and build even stronger, more productive relationships with employees.

Whew! That’s a lot of negatives, but we wanted to make sure that we give you a heads up, based on our experience about approaches that can defeat your survey initiative. We are proud that our client partners have never experienced these negative outcomes. Next month we promise to return to our usual positive focus.

Can you think of any other ways to destroy a survey?

The post 7 Reasons Employee Engagement Surveys Fail appeared first on Peter Barron Stark Companies.

In talking to managers and employees after we have conducted their survey, we ask for examples of where cross-departmental communication has been compromised. Many state that it is the stress of the economy, resulting in employees doing more with fewer people on the team. Employees talk about working harder, faster, and focusing solely on their own survival. Every case in which we ask for specifics, it’s apparent that teams are not trying to undermine the success of another team by withholding information they need to be successful. Rather, the issue lies in employees struggling to keep up with their job responsibilities and lacking the time to properly communicate with employees in other departments.

If cross-departmental communication issues are not addressed, over time, silos form and teams get into turf wars. In a worst case scenario, teams find themselves battling against each other instead of working together to achieve their shared objectives. We like to describe this phenomenon as misidentifying the enemy or playing against each other in a league.

Our extensive research demonstrates that almost all employees and their leaders can figure out how to communicate effectively and work well as a team within their own department. The challenge remains in communicating effectively with teams throughout the organization. The “gold standard” in our research is the Best-of-the Best, those organizations that consistently score in the top quartile of all the organizations we have surveyed with Employee Engagement Surveys. What separates the Best-of-the-Best organizations from the rest is their ability to understand how to communicate cross-departmentally, effectively unifying teams throughout the organization. Although all organizations struggle with cross-departmental communication, the Best-of-the-Best were 9 percentage points higher in 2011 when it came to effectively communicating across team/department/division lines.

One interesting side note about the Best-of-the-Best is that the average score for cross-departmental communication has decreased by 4 percentage points since 2008, indicating that even great organizations have struggled to maintain unity during these tough economic times.

To help you ensure that your teams stay united, we have assembled 10 tips that will help you increase your cross-departmental communication scores. Look back through your survey data and identify the departments that are in need of help. Then, put these tips into practice and start holding managers accountable for their communication scores. Get a head start on increasing their communication and overall cohesiveness so that by the time your next Employee Engagement Survey is completed, you could find yourself in the Best-of-the-Best category.

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