The Story Behind Employee Engagement

Check out the great article in Bloomberg Business Week this week on employee engagement. It delves into the issue of employee engagement, examining what it is, how managers need to approach the issue, and the definition of it. As Dov Seidman writes, "Employee engagement is a condition—manifested by the inspiration an employee unleashes in his or her work when he or she is deeply connected to a mission, purpose, and the values that connect us."

Do you have best practices for how you keep your employees engaged? How do you teach your managers to approach this workplace issue? And, why are so many workers disengaged?

Employee engagement is a hot topic today because the workplace is changing at lightning speed and if companies don't take the time to build a culture of engagement in their workplace, they will had a hard time retaining valuable employees.

Culture of Learning

I ran across an interesting article today that examines workplace cultures and asks the important question, "What are you doing to help the people who work for you or with you to be better?"

Have you ever taken the time to create your defiition of the perfect learning culture? What does it look like? What role do you, as learning professionals, play in that culture? Do you even know what a learning culture looks like? What tools, initiatives, and competencies does a learning culture need to sustain continuous learning?

These are important questions that need to be answered. I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on this topic.

What Will the New Workplace Look Like?

The economy changed the face of the workplace in 2009. More boomers continued working, delaying their retirement; organizations focused on performance and efficiency, expecting workers to do more with less; and technology made more mobile, 24/7 employees.

Expectations for learning changed also. Workplace learning and performance professionals were charged with the task of getting employee skills up to date, finding the company's key competitive advantage, and keeping employees engaged.

What will the workplace look like when the economic recession ends? What efficiencies gained during this cost-cutting economic downturn will emerge as new ways to do business in learning and development?

Attracting and Retaining the Mature Workforce

Just when you thought that Baby Boomers were exiting the workforce en masse, the economy went in the tank and the mature workers remained in the workplace. Some of the stereotypes about these workers haven't gone away either: Older workers can’t or won’t keep their skills current and older workers are not tech-savvy.

But as Minnesota Vikings quarterback Brett Favre showed in last night's Monday Night showdown with the Green Bay Packers, mature workers still have a lot of knowledge, experience, and heart to help their organizations succeed.

Does your organization have strategies to attract and retain older workers? Do you have a mentoring process in place that includes these invaluable employees?

Baby boomers are not leaving the workforce anytime soon, so you need to find ways to keep them engaged and ways to incorporate all generations into one workplace. The time is now.

Productivity at All-Time High

Last week, news surfaced that productivity—basically the amount of work per hour—increased at an annual rate of 6.6 percent during the second quarter. That’s the best performance since the summer 2003 and easily exceeded the 6.4 percent gain economists expected, according to the Labor Department.

So what does that really mean? Are workers being asked to do more in less time? If so, how is workplace training playing a part in this productivity?

Are the workers who are remaining on the jobsite the older, more experienced group or are those workers left behind during a RIF being upskilled quickly to meet the demands of the organization?

Measuring What Really Matters

Training is an investment. If your organization is investing money in workplace training, then training and development should be treated like any other investment—goals need to be aligned with business strategies, and accountability needs to be measured.

The recession has magnified the need for accountability. Learning professionals need to show how learning affects corporate performance by speaking the language of business when communicating the value of learning to executives, and by identifying ways in which the learning function supports the organization’s goals.

It is critical that professionals know what to measure, how to measure it, and how to present the results to the rest of the business. This includes understanding the business, the needs of employees, and how the training strategy links to business results.

To help learning maintain credibility, learning executives must think about results, measures, metrics, and analytics when designing and delivering workplace training programs. It is time to start delivering the data that executives demand, because if you fail to prove value, learning programs may be perceived as a waste of time and money.

Read Jack and Patty Phillips' article in this month's T+D.

The Power of Talent Management
When I scanned Google News for workplace training and development, two of the top five articles focused on "safeguarding and developing talent" and "engaging and retaining Millennials." Managing talent has never been more important.

During these tough economic times, people are your most valuable asset. The difference between competing businesses comes down to people, their performance, and their service to customers. Cost savings may be front and center on the minds of business executives, but cutting corners on employee development may be fatal to a company's future success.

Surviving a Corporate Meltdown

ASTD's monthly online publication, Learning Executives Briefing, talked with Ed Cohen,
head of Satyam’s learning organization, about the role his Satyam Learning World team played in first communicating the crisis, then helping the workforce to deal with its unexpected ramifications.

Corporate crises are all over the news, but the tale of Satyam Computer Services and its corrupt CEO sent shivers through the IT world. Read how the company’s learning organization dealt with the unenviable task of communicating with a workforce that had no real experience with job loss or the loss of respect and status. Read about it here.

Federal Reforms

I was shocked to see a recent article in FederalTimes.com that said that the federal government spent 1.9 percent of their payroll on training between 1997 and 2000. In contrast, the private sector spends averages about 4 percent of its payroll on employee training.

Most of that training money is on upgrading efficiency on job-related tasks, not soft skills pertaining to customer service relations or helping managers communicate with employees.

Apparently, the Obama administration finally recognized the injustice and is set to legislate action to set mandatory spending levels for employee training, retool the performance appraisal process, and create a performance-based pay system.

What percentage of your payroll is spent on employee training? What percentage of payroll should be spent on employee training?

The Mother of Innovation

In a world starving for fresh ideas, innovation is being tossed around like pennies as the solution to corporate ills.

If only it were so simple. Employees and managers don’t fall out of bed one day, decide to be innovative and voila, a new idea enters the marketplace. Most innovative companies dedicate resources and significant staff time to scouting new ideas. Oftentimes such companies find a niche before the average consumer and the marketplace is ready for it.

Being innovative does not mean creating a new gadget that did not exist in the marketplace. It refers to addressing a customer need or improving an existing product or service.

Decades ago IBM hired an expensive marketing firm to research the potential of high speed copying machines, according to Scott Anthony in his book, The Silver Lining. There was no need for such technology, marketers said. Good thing IBM didn’t listen.

The conservative nature and absence of creativity inside the walls of most organizations are two prime reasons why innovation is stifled. When executives declare that it is an employee’s job to be innovative that fails to inspire anyone. 3M famously allowed employees to spend 20 percent of their time generating ideas. Spending human capital is just as crucial as greenbacks.

It is possible to be innovative even among laggards like General Motors which developed the On Star hotline service, a highly successful mobile service that customers are willing to pay for.
Where is the best place to start? Try talking to customers first because they are the ones who are most likely best able to express their needs and wants. Few businesses do this today, focused as they are on survival or maintaining unrealistic standards of growth just a few years ago.

The perceived high cost of failure is another barrier to innovation. Most executives blanch at the thought of investing money in an idea that might not yield high returns.

For innovators, failure is only temporary as 3M discovered when its early attempts to create a semi-permanent glue planted the seeds for Post-It notes. Innovation requires the kind of thinking that breaks established convention, the kind of person who says why can’t we do this? It means not being afraid to submit an idea that others shy away from out of fear that it is “stupid” or might draw ridicule.