This month’s CROPS Report has a focus on people. What are you doing to motivate and engage your people?
Customer Satisfaction
As evident in the feature article, empowered employees offer a greater benefit to your organization than employees that show up to work in body, but not spirit. Engaged employees have more task and job ownership, thereby caring more about their jobs, which subsequently improves many aspects including their level of customer service. Caring employees take care of customers.
Risk Management
Retaining employees is a key aspect of risk management. Can your company afford to lose a ‘Ray’? What are you doing to keep your employees empowered and engaged in your organization, thereby improving retention and mitigating needless turnover. How are you supporting your managers in their learning and development in order to understand the importance of delegation, cross-training and letting go?
Operational Efficiencies
What kind of systems and processes has your orgnaization employed in order to stimulate employee engagement and development? Building organizational structures that support position ownership through various initiatives will improve overall empowerment.
People
This month’s feature article is on People.
Sales
Empowered employees sell more. Bottom line. Your sales are greatly affected by the engagement levels in your organization. When employees love what they do, they love the company they work for, which positively contributes to their level of success in generating revenue.
Feature Article: People EmPOWERed
Within the scope of X5’s service offerings we support all aspects of business within CROPS. This month’s CROPS report feature article focuses on people and empowerment.
At X5 we believe in “improving business process through people.” It is WHY we do what we do!
As an organization, your people are the cornerstone to your business success.
Here is a hypothetical story of an employee named Ray.
Ray has worked for the company he is currently employed at for 5 years. He works hard and does a very good job, but in the past 6 months something has changed. He is feeling frustrated and questions his abilities almost every day. But why? Ray reports to a manager that likes to do things “his way,” and his way may change from day-to-day. (There is no consistency or structure). Ray has 8 people that report to him and he used to make decisions with ease, but he is finding that his manager is continually overriding his decisions. Ray is not feeling very empowered at this time.
When people like Ray no longer feel empowered they eventually stop making decisions. If this continues for Ray, and it appears that his manager isn’t changing anytime soon, Ray will become less engaged in his work. When people aren’t engaged in decisions they may look for greener pastures. Sometimes they “quit the job,” but still show up to work every day and go through the motions. In addition to Ray’s empowerment and engagement issues, he has not had a performance evaluation “in writing” for over 2 years and there has never been a conversation about Ray’s “development plan” or future with the company. When people aren’t continually developing new skills, they stop growing, learning and adding value to the company. When people don’t receive constructive feedback on their performance they start to question their abilities and their future.
Does Ray sound like anyone you may know? Does he work in your company? Are you Ray at times?
In order to feel empowered employees like Ray need to be given the opportunity to make decisions. Ray is not going to be getting a memo from the President of the company stating: “effective immediately you are hereby empowered.” It doesn’t quite work that way.
How can your company improve the way people become empowered?
-Allow them to make decisions
-Support the decisions that they make
-Delegate more responsibility to them and show that you trust them
How can your employees become more engaged?
-Ask for their input and listen to what they have to say
-Increase responsibility
-Show them that you are listening to them
How can your company do a better job of developing the skills of your people?
-Find out what their strengths are
-Ask what areas that they want to improve on and create a plan to get started on honing those skills
-Offer feedback and regular performance evaluation
Ask X5 how we work with companies and support them by improving business process through people. If you are ready to improve your business in this area, we want to hear from you.
Offer: It’s SUMMER and we feel generous. For the first 5 companies that respond to us by Friday, July 26th at 5pm, and they are ready to improve business process through their people, we will offer a “FREE” 90 minute workshop on tips to creating greater engagement within your business.
Are you ready to improve your business?
