Not going the extra mile

When looking at employee engagement a lot, you’ll come across the phrase “going the extra mile” a lot too. It’s often cited as one of the benefits of employee engagement, or as a measure, or almost as a synonym.
I don’t like it. My association is always requiring more, without return. For starting early or working late. For an expectation of doing more than contracted. That’s not a fair deal. That’s the employee “going the extra mile”; the employer: “taking the p!ss”.
I love a lot of Engage 4 Success’s work, but at about 40s into their main video, an employee describes engagement as “… I’ll give you more of the real me. The one who stays late when it counts, the one who puts in the extra effort…”. Thanks, but no thanks.
Which I think is a shame, especially as the next line is “…the one who cares about what they do…”
That’s much closer to the real outcome of engagement. If you care, if you’re connected, if you’re involved - if you see the mutual benefit of doing this well - then the likelihood is you’ll DO it well. You’ll give it more thought, weigh a few more options. It’s not “that’ll do”, it’s “that’ll work!” It’s more brain than brawn; smart work, not hard work.
I’m looking for a new idiom to replace “going the extra mile”. Ideas? hashtag#employeeengagement hashtag#engagement hashtag#extramile

Research and Fake News

Look at this statistic. Damning isn’t it? There’s just one problem – there doesn’t seem to be a creditable source for it, despite it appearing in mainstream media. It appears to be fake news. This brings together research and inclusion, so I wanted to know more. It's an apparently sound piece of evidence, and quoted in many – often respectable - places. But always without a link to the original research. This is something I see quite a lot. It means there’s no evidence of how it was collected, with who, the questions asked or the tests conducted. That’s the price of speed of information. That’s how the world operates. 24 hour rolling news is “never wrong for long”. Trouble is, that’s not how it works at work. If you’re gathering evidence for a proposal or to support a change of systems in the workplace, you can’t afford to be embarrassed by dodgy facts. You can’t simply print a correction at the bottom of page 16. Found a killer stat? One that supports your case? One that inspires you to make changes? Somehow stats like this one have a habit of bouncing around being re-reported and re-parroted out. Just take time to go back to the original evidence, and satisfy yourself that it stands up. hashtag#inclusion hashtag#research hashtag#facts

I don’t believe in annual engagement surveys

I do, truly, believe in the greatest number of the most engaged people.

Annual surveys are percentages, dashboards, benchmarks. Just numbers. Which don’t tell you:

• why your employees think how they do
• what to do next

There’s three main problems:

• Lack of Voice:
  You canvas broad opinion from staff. But waste their energy answering YOUR questions. What would THEIR questions be? What’s most important? How would they innovate / improve?
• Reliance on Benchmarks:
  No external organisation is like yours, all are on a different journey. That benchmark is irrelevant AND perhaps grants permission to be average, not excellent. Who wants to be average?
• Measuring the wrong thing:
  You want greater productivity, more sales, better customer experience, longer employee tenure etc. Surveys measure elements of engagement (and don’t all agree). It’s Goodhart’s Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." You try to improve the measure, not what makes you a better organisation.

AND they may not feel a safe space, don’t get leadership commitment, aren’t shared back openly and take too damn long.

I believe in employee opinion. But with human interaction, and with a true voice for how their experience can be better and how your organisation can improve.

What do you think? What’s your experience?

You should be dancing (yeah)

The e-mail pings. The phone buzzes, and skirls across the desk. It’s a new project.

How do you react? Freeze, flight or flight?

Or… do you step away from your desk and do a little dance?

As an employee in a number of large organisations, I wasn’t dancing. Some places, and times, were dancier than others, but in general, new work wasn’t something to get too excited about. Most often it just added to a to-do-list that already daunted me.

I didn’t feel that a new piece of work was a pat on the back. It give me that recognition or feedback that I was credible, expert or reliable. And however diligent I was, did I genuinely connect that piece of work and my next wage slip?

No. Too often new work was an inconvenience. That virtuous circle of work/purpose/reward was broken.

I run my own business now – and work can be a chore at times. Not all of it is glamourous, some can be a little rote at times. And a new piece might land when I’d planned another project, or was going to work on new business, or I was going to finish early of a Friday and slope off to the Beer Shed.

But every new piece of work is a celebration, and there is a genuine, actual, physical dance for each one. (And a bonus twitter gif too.)

Now, some of those dances are not much more than a shimmy-and-slide; maybe it’s just a days’ work, it’s not too challenging, the results won’t shake anyone’s world. But some of them are a full-on freestyle freak-out – it’s great work, I want to get stuck in, I can immerse myself in it and produce some crucial, insight-driven recommendations.

The purpose is back, I can see the link to reward, and the work is better for it.

I never realised how important it was that work might make me dance. Now, I can’t imagine work without it.

Why your employee surveys won't tell you what you want to know (and what to do about it)

Employee surveys won’t give you the answers you want.

Why? Partly fatigue. By the time people get your survey, they’ve already been asked for their feedback, rating and review on 27 different products and services. Online surveys are too easy to put together and distribute. But that’s just a new sub-problem.

Surveys never have, and never will, give you the answers you want.

Unless you’re caught up on the whole idea of benchmarking. And if you are – well, then there’s a whole industry dedicated to scratching that itch.

Here’s the problem: You can’t predict all that your people might think.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? If you knew the answers, you wouldn’t ask the questions.

So, you’re stuck with missing stuff out or asking a bajillion questions. Missing stuff out sounds like a bad idea, so most people plump for the bajillion. And then add a few more, just to be sure.

For one, that’s not really playing well to the whole fatigue issue. For another, you’re still going to miss stuff.

So, here at Monteath Towers, we take a different approach.

We accept that we’ll miss stuff, but instead we want people to express themselves. We accept that we can’t predict all that your people might think, so we don’t try. Instead we ask them to tell us it all.

That means we pick only the most crucial fixed/scale questions. We do want some quant, we might want to see change over time. But those fixed questions serve another purpose. They are a stimulus and a prompt for free comment questions.

Because that’s where we see the real value. That’s where we can say: “Tell us what you really think, what you really want. We’re listening.”

The fixed questions are then just focussing that expression in free comment – they’re stimulating thoughts and ideas. They’re the germ of “you know what really hacks me off…” and “wouldn’t it be brilliant if…”.

It takes longer to analyse, but that’s because there is more to discover. There are themes to find, but also what truly resonates, where there is real strength of feeling. There are as-yet-unformed nuggets of ideas – ones that could be transformative if allowed to blossom. There are isolated niggles – ones that you could see could undermine all your efforts if unchecked.

But most of all, it shows you the priorities and what to investigate further.

Remember, whatever you do: Surveys won’t give you the answers you want. But they can allow to focus your next efforts with real precision and insight.

Your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind

When trying to impress or surprise, or sometimes appal, I mention that I hold a Joint Honours degree in Maths and Physics.

Undertaken following a series of perfectly avoidable mistakes, I was entirely unsuited to the course, and it subsequently hasn’t afforded me much advantage in life.

But it entrenched my passion for number, I won’t accept anything but a fair test, and, well, I love the process of science.

That’s beautifully expressed by Lord Kelvin; “…when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.”

(Or rather more drearily by Peter Drucker: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”.)

Observing engagement and communication strategy, there is a consistent lack of measurement.

There may be lack of capability. There may be a lack of curiosity. There may not be the clout to get the budget or time to make the measurement. There’s perhaps an unwillingness to lift the lid.

But this I know. Lift that lid. Take a look. Measure effects. See what you find. Draw conclusions. And apply what you’ve learnt. Your clout-o-meter will rise, fast.

Look at what’s most important to your employees.

See how is best to reach them

Assess if what you propose to do will make an impact

Find out if you are cutting through.

All of this – and much more in your interactions with your people - is observable, quantifiable and therefore improvable.

Do more measurement.

But… you can go too far.

Hold in mind Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle “the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa”:

(Or, more mundanely, as Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure)

Don’t get bogged down in the number. The number is there to justify the means, to target the message, to precisely focus the efforts.

Always remember that it is the powerful word, the galvanising mission and the human interaction that wins.

That’s what changes behaviour, generates ideas and unites people to a cause. That builds momentum.

Do more measurement (but always know your place).

Always Crashing In The Same Car

I’ve paused for the first time in a while. And it’s good to reflect. When projects come thick and fast, you can drive, or drift, through in the same way, regardless of previous success.

Do you endlessly offer up offer Frog a la Peche in the face of all evidence? (Confused? Here’s a link)

This isn’t “I’ve always done it that way”-ism. I think that’s rather different – albeit a pernicious blocker to achievement. What I’m talking about is something subtler, and it’s well described in this article. “Our brains don’t learn from our past mistakes to the extent we might hope. In fact, thinking about past flubs might only doom us to repeat them”. Sounds worrying, but you might think that doesn’t happen to you. Yeah? Read this:

“In 2008, researchers at McMaster University in Ontario found a similar problem took place with “tip of the tongue” phenomenon. “This can be incredibly frustrating — you know you know the word, but you just can’t quite get it,” the researcher Karin Humphreys told LiveScience at the time. “And once you have it, it is such a relief that you can’t imagine ever forgetting it again. But then you do.” The reason? The time you spend sifting for that word reinforces a “mistake pathway” in the brain, essentially digging yourself further into the wrong groove. The next time you’re hunting for the elusive word, your brain will reflexively draw a blank instead.”

Sounds more familiar now? And if so, have I been busy burning new mistake pathways? I know that when running research, I have come to one of my own questions and thought: “Uch, why have I used that? I always have to rephrase!” And then it turns up again in another design… Or, for at least a few months, I was analyse data rather laboriously. Previously I’d done it far more efficiently. Just once I hadn’t been able to make it work, hence a long-hand workaround. And, it seems, I burned this new path.

But as I reflect, I’ve thought about how I have learned. At the outset my approach to qualitative was very much set up around free discussion. That’s my comfort zone. But I recognised some of its limitations; it’s not others’ comfort zone, it can limit how much some could express themselves, it can be reliant on people arriving with answers. So, I’ve naturally adapted, and now design involves a greater mix of written response, small group exercises, use of stimulus, online groups and others. Next I want to look at using games, and potentially use of video capture.

That provides a richer insight, and allows me to be far more flexible in applications. It’s all aspects of the employee experience – from never-thought-about-them-potential-candidate, to engaging-the-seen-it-all-before employee, to capturing the collective wisdom of the workforce.

And you know what – it’s different for me. I’m not burning down the same pathways, it’s keeping it fresh and less formulaic. And if I’m on my toes, that’s always going to get a better result.

However busy you may be, keep working on your own game.