FireFly Facilitation

Many of us may be familiar with Gallup’s research that has shown: Engaged employees are more productive, profitable, safer, create stronger customer relationships, and stay longer with their company than less engaged employees.

Now research also shows that employee engagement is a powerful factor in catalyzing “outside-the-box” thinking to improve management and business processes as well as customer service.  This Gallup survey of US workers showed:

• 59% of engaged employees strongly agreed with the statement that their current job “brings out their most creative ideas” – vs only 3% of actively disengaged employees

• Engaged workers are much more likely (6 out of 10) to react positively to creative ideas offered by fellow team members.  Thus, higher levels of employee engagement not only increases the likelihood individual employees will generate new ideas, but also that idea generation among engaged employees can be amplified when it occurs in a team setting. 

What are you doing today to drive employee engagement in your organization?  What if you simply took 20 minutes from your routine staff meeting and used that for brainstorming time?  What tough business challenges is your team facing today that couldn’t be improved by tapping into the creativity of your team members?

Next post…great brainstorming tips and tools!

Here’s the headline:  Employee engagement drives loyalty and business performance at World’s Most Admired Companies.   According to the Hay Group’s latest research, top companies are particularly focused on making sure employees feel engaged by their work.

Hay also conducted supplemental research on employee engagement practices at these organizations, which found that companies at the top of the list generated stronger employee loyalty to the organization over the last two years and reported greater decreases in employee frustrations over work conditions that were not conducive to their success.

“The World’s Most Admired Companies have been particularly good at focusing on long-term strategies, showing little tolerance for executives that compromise long-term objectives for short-term gains,” said Mel Stark, vice president with the Hay Group. “Equally important, the WMAC communicate their objectives to all employees, connecting the goals and objectives of every employee to the overall business strategy, and as a result, were able to come out of the downturn with motivated and loyal employees.”  Hay Group’s study found that 90 percent of respondents from the WMAC identified their company as very effective or effective at fostering high levels of employee engagement compared to 71 percent of their peers.

These findings are supported by another study conducted by consulting firm Towers Perrin (now Towers Watson).  They conducted a Global Workforce Study, the largest study of its kind, in which they asked 90,000 employees in 18 countries,  “What can a company do to attract, retain, and engage top talent?”  They boiled it down to 5 key things:

1. Get leaders out front to talk with employees about the business environment…how the organization is responding…the long-term vision…what the organization stands for.
2. Involve employees in efforts to manage costs to help them feel like active contributors.
3. Communicate consistently and candidly about both short- and long-term objectives.
4. Listen and gather input from employees.
5. Promote development opportunities so people can see a future for themselves worth working toward.

 If you look at 1,3 and 5, you will see these are all about talking to or telling employees something about the company.  2 & 4 are all about listening and getting employees to tell you ways to manage costs, perhaps front line customer feedback on what needs to change, etc.  The researchers noted: “The challenge for senior management is to recognize the value of employees’ untapped potential and to channel it in ways that yield real improvements in business performance.” 

More engagement comes from being recognized as unique and with value.  The good news is with a more engaged team – the leader doesn’t feel they have to do this alone – it truly becomes a team effort.  And they may even come to care as much about the success of the organization as you do.

What do you need to start doing today to attract, retain and engage your top talent?  There’s no time to waste, because even in this tough job market, your highest performers always have choices.

In a recent Accenture survey, 89% of executives agreed that innovation is as important as cost management for high performance.  This indicates a big shift from 2009.  The emphasis for most companies last year was on how to cut expenses.  This year, there is the realization that you can’t cut your way to business growth.  And this survey bears that out.

Okay, from the Accenture survey we know execs think innovation is important.  Below is the Daily Stat email I receive from Harvard Business Review (a very valuable resource that I strongly encourage you to check out).  From this Ernst and Young survey, we can see that only half of the senior executives see their companies as more innovative than their competition – and 17% even say their less innovative than peers.   

There are several reasons cited for this.  For example, while many companies are investing more in innovation, only a few have a rigorous approach for managing the process.  As a result even innovative companies often fail to realize the benefits that their new ideas could produce.

Interestingly, almost half of them blame the lack of appropriate personnel as a major contributor to their lack of innovation.  You know as well as I do that you can’t just go getting rid of everyone you don’t think is creative – and in fact you don’t have to.  There are ways – which I will share with you in later blog posts – for discovering and tapping into the creativity in each of us. 

And this is where you come in.  Strategic, progressive leaders have an incredible role to play in boosting the innovation occurring within their companies – and it all begins with employee engagement.   Next post – some proven ideas for how to engage your top talent.

Innovation….when you hear this word, what comes to mind?  When I pose this question to a group, I often hear “Apple”, “Something new”, or similar response.

If you look it up in a standard dictionary, like Websters or American Heritage, the definition is simple and straightforward: ”the introduction of something new.”  If, however, you look it up in Business Dictionary.com, you get a very different result: “The process by which an idea or invention is translated into a good or service for which people will pay.  To be called an innovation, an idea must be replicable at an economical cost and must satisfy a specific need.”

The “regular” person’s definition is so much better and more freeing than the business minded one.  I call this the difference between innovation with a little “i” – innovation for everyone – and innovation with a big “I” that stands up to the very tough scrutiny of the business world.   We wonder why we see innovation as a slogan by top execs instead of something that actually gets done.  How do you know if something is going to make money unless you give it a chance?  In many companies we cut new ideas off at the knees because we can’t see right off how it can possibly be profitable.

Let me tell you the story of Alexander Fleming.  It’s 1928 and apparently Dr. Fleming is a pretty messy scientist.  One day he’s cleaning out the petri dishes he had been using to grow bacteria.  Something catches his eye.  Something had contaminated one of the staph cultures – in fact it had killed the bacteria.

Do you know what he had discovered – penicillin — by accident!  “When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer,” Fleming would later say, “But I guess that was exactly what I did.”

A huge success, right?  Wrong!  There were so many difficulties associated with producing penicillin in mass quantities, it would be another 12 years before the world realized what he had created.  We need the broader definition of innovation…so that we can celebrate the learning…not just the end result.

What “discoveries” - no matter how small and seemingly insignificant – have you made recently?  What can you find to celebrate – not just the end result but what you learned from it – and how you can apply those learnings?

Change By Design by Tim Brown (2009)

 I recently had the opportunity to lead a book club discussion on this fantastic guide to innovation, Change By Design by Tim Brown, CEO of renowned design firm IDEO and guru of the next wave of innovation… “design thinking” .  Below are some key excerpts you can check out to see if you want to read the whole book – or just get by with these cliff notes!

What is design thinking?

“An approach to innovation that is powerful, effective, and broadly accessible, that can be integrated into all aspects of business and society, and that individuals and teams can use to generate breakthrough ideas that are implemented and that therefore have an impact.”

 Why do we need it?

“As the center of economic activity in the developing world shifts inexorably from industrial manufacturing to knowledge creation and service delivery, innovation has become nothing less that a survival strategy.  It is moreover no longer limited to the introduction of new physical products but includes new sorts of processes, services, interactions, entertainment forms, and ways of communicating and collaborating.” 

 How does it work?

     “The continuum of innovation is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps.  We can think of them as inspiration, the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions; ideation, the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas; and implementation, the path that leads from the project room to market.”

     “The willing and even enthusiastic acceptance of competing constraints is the foundation of design thinking. The first stage of the design process is often about discovering which constraints are important and establishing a framework for evaluating them.  Constraints can best be visualized as a series of overlapping criteria for successful ideas: feasibility (what is functionally possible within the foreseeable future); viability (what is likely to become part of a sustainable business model); and desirability (what makes sense to people and for people).”

     “The classic starting point of any design project is the brief…a set of mental constraints that gives the project team a framework from which to begin, benchmarks by which they can measure progress, and a set of objectives to be realized: price point, available technology, market segment, and so on…The clarity, direction, and limits of a well-defined project are vital to sustaining a high level of creative energy.”

     “The tools of the design thinker – getting out into the world to be inspired by people, using prototyping to learn with our hands, creating stories to share our ideas, joining forces with people from other disciplines – and ways of deepening what we know and widening the impact of what we do.”

 Who excels at it?

“There is a popular saying around IDEO that ‘all of us are smarter than any of us’…To operate within an interdisciplinary environment, an individual needs to have strengths in two dimensions – the ‘T-shaped’ person…On the vertical axis, every member of the team needs to possess a depth of skill that allows him or her to make tangible contributions to the outcome….Design thinkers cross the ‘T’…people with the capacity  and – just as important – the disposition for collaboration across disciplines.  In the end, this ability is what distinguishes the merely multidisciplinary team from a truly interdisciplinary one…There is a collective ownership of ideas and everybody takes responsibility for them.”

What cultural environment is needed?

“To be creative, a place does not need to be crazy, kooky, and located in northern California.  What is a prerequisite is an environment – social but also spatial – in which people know they can experiment, take risks, and explore the full range of their faculties.”

What are the benefits to the organization?

“There is an important lesson here about the challenges of shifting from a culture of hierarchy and efficiency to one of risk taking and exploration.  Those who navigate this transition successfully are likely to become more deeply engaged, more highly motivated, and more wildly productive than they ever have before.”

[Two great examples of successful design projects – Bank of America (p. 119+) and Japan’s Cool Biz (p. 127+)

Potential Discussion Questions:

1. What are three highlights from what you read – either things you strongly agreed or disagreed with?
2. Do you believe it is possible to create a culture of design thinkers?  Why or why not?
3. Are there clients that you think might be ready participants in the introduction of design thinking into their culture?
4. What would it take to create this culture?  How would you approach from a change management perspective?
5. What do you think would be the greatest challenges you would face?  How would you overcome them?
6. Do you believe in the business case and need for a new approach to innovation in this next decade?