Tag Archives: engaged

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Engage Your Employees With a Powerful Mission

12 Steps to Business Transformation – Step 2

Last week I introduced my Ebook 12 Steps to Business Transformation and I defined Vision, the first of the 12 transformational steps. This week we are going to talk about Mission.

Defining the Mission for your business is step 2 in my new free Ebook “12 Steps to Business Transformation.”

Where Vision is defined as a powerful picture of the future which creates an ideal and unique image of what your organization will become or achieve (the compelling reason WHY your business exists), the Mission defines exactly where you are going and what you are doing right now to attain the Vision.

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Is Your Main Thing Really Your Main Thing?

“The main thing is keeping the main thing the main thing.”  Stephen Covey

 

What is your “main thing”? What is it that you do so well that people are willing to pay you for it? If you are not doing your main thing, or what you do best every day, chances are you are frustrated and even disengaged at work. According to Gallup annual poll, only 31.5% of US employees were engaged at work in 2014. That means that 68.5% of the US is not engaged in their work! As business leaders, this should scare us!

My main thing is leadership. Specifically: strategy, process and structure, and communication. Today, I do that from a business point of view by setting business strategy and vision, building processes and structure to implement that strategy and then communicating to the organization through this process. Prior to business leadership, I did the same thing from a project management perspective and, earlier, from an engineering and construction perspective.

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And The Employee Engagement Survey Says . . .　

Last week I wrote a post entitled Your Employees Are Happy . . . And Other Popular Myths. In this post I explained that having happy employees and having engaged employees are not necessarily the same thing and that as business leaders we need to strive for engaged employees.

I provided links for two informal surveys to gauge where the readers of the blog sit with respect to the Gallup engagement poll results that stated that only 31% of US employees are engaged at work. I provided a survey for managers and a separate one for employees.

This week, we will take a look at a summary of the results.

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Your Employees Are Happy . . . And Other Popular Myths!

Are your employees really happy? What does “happy” actually mean? Are we even asking the correct question? Perhaps we should ask; “Are your employees engaged at work?”

According to Gallup only 31% of US workers are engaged at work (the numbers in Canada are similar to this). This is scary! It means that 69% of our workers are either not engaged or, worse yet, actively disengaged. This is costing our economy billions of dollars each year!

Being happy or satisfied at work is not the same thing as being engaged. According to Gallup, paying people high wages, providing Ping-Pong tables and free meals may result in “happy” employees and high employee satisfaction survey scores but it does not mean that your employees are engaged and productive. Jim Clifton stated; “A winning culture is one of engagement and individual contribution to an important mission and purpose. Human beings are not looking for company-bought goodies — they are looking for meaningful, fulfilling work. It is the new great global dream — to have a good job, not a free lunch. The dream is to have a job in which you work for a great manager; where you constantly develop; and where you can use your God-given strengths every single day.”