10

Getting Started

The Workplace Engagement Solution represents breakthrough improvements for most cultures. Although pulling this together might seem overwhelming at first, I suggest taking more of a Japanese kaizen approach by establishing a highly defined end result and then taking incremental steps to get there. Also, be mindful to develop a “right-sized” approach that fits the size and scope of your organization. In a large, multi-national organization, for example, it will make great sense to have a team reporting directly to the CEO to implement and grow the initiative with the full weight of top leadership. Small organizations may too quickly dismiss the ideas outlined in this book. The truth is that small organizations don’t have the option of making big mistakes around culture and talent; they need to be vigilant as well. The need to build engagement and an almost elite athleticism around swift, effective change is more—not less—significant.

The most appropriate approach for optimal success is for the owner or CEO to directly work with their people until a fully self-sustaining process takes shape. Though it takes an investment of time, it is time well worth the ROI it will foster in stabilizing and elevating the culture for all involved.

If you are reading this and you are not the CEO or business owner, remember this process is designed for everyone’s benefit. By now, you probably understand that continual learning, courage skills, connectivity, and engagement are vital aspects of your career success and the success of any organization you may join. I suggest that you use every tool in the book; apply each skill to your own life, and important transformation will permeate all aspects of your personal and professional life.

The following are the steps to launching your own Workforce Engagement Solution.

CEO/Business Owner

Like CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand, Adam Miller, take charge of your culture. Be personally responsible and personally involved. It can be helpful to ask yourself the following questions:

• What kind of employer brand will fulfill our vision?

• What are the values, central competencies, and style of our ideal employees?

• When people hear our organization’s name, how do we want them to envision our people?

• How effective is our workforce with continuous learning? What do they bring to the organization as a result?

• What is the current “engagement state” of our managers and how will we improve that?

• What are the various forms of my own personal bias?

• How will I orchestrate the change and engagement solution in my organization?

This should not be left to accidental success or haphazard failure. We need to design your workplace to fit your values and vision, but if you want productive energy and excitement, you need to push the envelope further. Stand your ground and don’t compromise. Compromising will always result in partial sacrifice of your vision and, essentially, will compromise you.

Exercise: Pull out a clean sheet of paper or open a fresh screen on your device. Give it a title.

Our Future State

Based on everything you have read, what are you inspired to build? Describe the new state as clearly and as vividly as possible. When you finish the initial document, keep it in a safe place. This one will never be finished. It is only a beginning, one that you will want to update on a continual basis.

After the initial overview, answer these additional questions to help clarify every significant aspect of your engagement culture. (These questions are valuable for all members within the culture.)

1. What are the capabilities that would allow every segment of the workforce to execute their own personal change?

2. In order to build a fully engaged workplace, what kinds of changes are you going to need to make in yours and others’ behavior?

3. What happens to your organization when it is filled with continuous learners?

4. What changes and improvements will bring full transparency to your culture?

Now, it is time to assemble the people that will help you. Discuss with them all that you want to accomplish and move forward.

The Book Club

Begin the journey by giving every employee a copy of The Workplace Engagement Solution. Establish several expectations for absorbing and applying the ideas from the book. Here are some examples of how to message the effort to your employees:

• The organization is beginning a culture development process focused on developing the skills of self-change within every employee and establishing a fully engaged culture. This is not just a culture change initiative. It is a commitment to build and expect the best of everyone within the organization. This initiative is about building a culture together that people want to join in order to grow and thrive.

• Ask for feedback from everyone based on the following seven questions:

1. How did you react to the ideas in this book?

2. What do you most want to learn?

3. How do you envision growing the skills within the organization?

4. How could this process impact you personally?

5. Are you interested in helping to organize an effort on this within our organization?

6. Would you be interested in becoming a mentor? If so, why?

7. What do you hope the outcomes of this process will be?

• Have intact teams meet once per week to discuss one chapter of the book. Explore how the views impact each member of the team. If there are questions in the chapter, answer them as well as the questions from the book report introduction.

The Book Club will accomplish a great deal in preparing the organization and setting new cultural expectations. It begins a vital conversation that introduces new concepts, helps team members absorb the ideas, and allows them to begin envisioning the change process within themselves as well as in the organization. It also gives stakeholders real opportunities to voice their points of view about the process. People need time to digest and internalize the concepts and insights. It is a time period that helps natural leaders step forward to voice their enthusiasm and desire to adopt the skills and processes as soon as possible. It also gives the organization indicators about potential mentors. This is about change with others, rather than imposing change onto others.

Implementation Team

Continuing with the theme of “right-sizing” to your organization, the team can be as small as one or two in smaller environments. In larger organizations, the team can include the CEO, chief human resources officer, learning executive, and any other leaders that either have a strong attraction to the engagement solution or who demonstrate most of the skills. The team will be responsible for not only implementation but also with continuity and sustainability. In other words, every aspect of the solution must be built into an ongoing practice to develop the new culture and instill the genuine lasting improvement that is required.

Communications and Policy

All policy communications ought to be delivered by the CEO or business owner. Without this critical element of success, the entire process gets funky and develops a lackluster feel based on the reality of a low commitment level. Depending upon the size of the organization, there will be a variety of individuals who can help with building the process. The communications need to describe the vision and voice the new expectations. The trance, for everyone, is officially over. You are now working together to build an organization that celebrates growth, that continuously learns, and that gives high quality attention to customers, but also to colleagues, vendors, and employees themselves. Convey that everyone owns and is accountable to the new reality and will be required to demonstrate what that means in a personal way.

Self-Inquiry

Continuous self-inquiry, for most people, is extremely rare. Many people have been conditioned to seek outside stimuli and reference points rather than connecting with their own truth. Why? Part of the reason is that the journey inward can bring a certain discomfort. Consequently, we need good role models who can demonstrate how it is done and help to ritualize self-inquiry until it becomes a natural, comfortable part of the culture as well as an expectation for personal development within the organization. Everyone participates.

The self-inquiry processes can be built into notepad rituals and protocols as well as online formats. Exercises should include the following elements.

• Strategic and career development targets (three, six, and/or 12 months)

• Change awareness—developing clarity around beneficial personal and collective change.

• Time value (daily)—using self-inquiry to get the most out of the day ahead.

• Positive action (weekly)—identifying the most valuable actions to take regardless of whether they come easy or with discomfort.

As the workforce engagement solution grows with practice, employees will eventually learn to administer self-inquiry, become mentors to others, and provide oversight to the process.

Learning

Drawing Healthy Attention to Oneself

Teach everyone question-driven consultative sales skills to boost their ability to connect with others’ needs and expectations. Provide presentation skills training broadly so that people can learn how to present in front of others and connect with an audience. Today, presentation skills development ought to include one-on-one, speaker-to-audience, and virtual (on camera) presentations to remote audiences. Each has different needs and success drivers. The training is not to turn everyone into a sales executive, but to instill comfort and skill with varying forms of communication, attention, influence, and persuasion. One of the most important benefits of these presentations is to help each person take greater ownership of their work and apply critical thinking to what it is that they do. The process helps them apply enthusiasm to the role and if they cannot find it, reveal the need to change themselves or change their role.

To significantly boost the benefits of this work, it is relatively easy to establish a Toastmasters chapter in your organization, and it is also easy to find one in your neighborhood. By encouraging your employees to attend, their skills improve quickly through practice, feedback, and repetition.

You may opt to build learning programs that are delivered in person or online. Regardless, remember that building skills in this area only comes through practice. Make it a point to give everyone opportunities to step forward and make presentations in a variety of group settings, from one-on-one to small and large groups, and also in video environments. Encourage teams to share opportunities to make presentations at meetings and rotate members so that everyone has regular opportunities to be in front of the group. This is a tremendously powerful professional development opportunity and personal growth experience.

Support Systems and Community Building

Building support is a continuous and ongoing process. One of the best places to begin is in social networking training because this is how people network today. However, you will want a specific type of training. Teach your employees how to identify great leads for their work, their careers, and their learning, and to find new mentors. Show them how to find leads that could become valued assets for the organization. Help them learn how to communicate with far more “high-touch” methods than simply sending a generic note or resorting to high-volume impersonal mailings. Set the expectation that everyone is responsible to find new resources for themselves and the organization. Help them to think for themselves and gain a deeper understanding of the organization’s success equation. For example, whenever we introduce changes to the mission, vision, and purpose, we must also generate and customize new support systems. It’s about making more people capable and responsible for the critical thinking and analysis that goes beyond normal operations.

As mentors are developed within the organization, they will become a resource for developing stronger support systems with the customers and clients of the organization. Mentors will help participants develop support around personal finance, health and wellness, skill-building, mentorship, education, administration, play and leisure, childcare, risk-taking, and fear management.

The bottom line is that you need to make social networking and community building a strong part of the overall culture. With my organization’s work in this area, we find that understanding the value of a strong community of support can be extremely powerful and transformative. Use it to elevate and enhance the process to improve talent acquisition, sales, and business intelligence. Create new and unique strategic partnerships and be on constant watch to identify new opportunities.

The Mentor-Driven Culture

Returning to the model of the AA mentorship culture, mentors are not derived from a caste system. For example, simply being a senior executive within an organization does not necessarily qualify someone as a role model for self-change and engagement. The title of mentor is one that must be earned. Unless the organization has a highly restrictive structure, we advise that you not make mentorship just another aspect of management. This route can corrupt the mentoring process and erase the benefits of pure mentorship throughout the organization. It can also corrupt the standards around “engagement for all.”

Keep mentorship in a special category: an aspirational role that is above and beyond any job description. How many managers in their current state would make good mentors? Of course we want managers and executives with superb mentorship capabilities, but that is not a given. If we award the title without deeper scrutiny, we can compromise the qualities and the recognition that comes from earning the role. Mentoring is an art and a sacred trust. All stand to gain from the deeper exploration of what it means to do it well.

Early Adopters

Depending upon the size of the organization, seek to find individuals who naturally demonstrate many of these skills and naturally understand the concepts within this book as the people to put on a fast track. Regardless, take the most responsible and enthusiastic volunteers. Track their progress and support them in the mentoring relationship directly.

Talent Acquisition and Right Fit

No matter what size your organization, always develop an in-depth employer brand that defines the tribe and a clear understanding of the people who fit into that tribe. No matter what, create a seamless and effective talent acquisition process that identifies ideal fit at every level of the supply chain.

Strive to create an acquisition process that provides quality experiences for candidates and new hires alike. Develop talent acquisition skills throughout the organization. In many cases, hiring managers need training in how to hire to this level of performance. Provide resources that help everyone involved with talent acquisition to identify their own biases. Establish clear objectives regarding what right fit looks like. This becomes the standard. Watch for resistance in the form of old, misguided filters such as “We don’t have time.” Quite candidly, they often don’t have the time because of the dysfunction that occurs from sloppy hiring and talent acquisition practices.

Transparency

It is important to establish full transparency around the process through workplace configuration, policy, technology, and intention. When everyone sees how others are performing it creates a natural competition, establishes baselines for performance, and builds trust. Time and time again, even simple technology upgrades offer immediate improvements with engagement and customer performance. With the advent of the virtual workplace, all types of software have emerged that measures virtually every metric of performance. At a glance, anyone can see how peers, direct reports, and superiors are performing. The spirit behind building transparency is to remove isolation in the physical workplace so that team members are seen and available to each other. Finally, “walk the talk.” When senior management tells people to do something and then does not practice it personally, employees feel patronized and end up “going through the motions.”

The invitation is to create a culture in which there is nothing to hide. If you can’t readily see it, begin by envisioning it, wanting it, or just having the courage to go through with it. If it’s still elusive, then it might be time to examine why. Security and transparency are vastly different issues and both can live peacefully together. Transparency suggests that all of us are practicing behavior and creating value that all eyes can see and connect with.

Feedback

It’s simple. Establish feedback in a variety of areas.

Employee Surveys

Don’t use surveys to measure complaints and criticism. If that is the current state, surveys only remind employees of why they are having so much difficulty with the culture. Use surveys to measure progress! Use them to demonstrate how the learning programs are progressing and to offer opportunities for suggestions on how to better develop your change and engagement initiatives. Use surveys to measure the quality of mentorship and performance, relationships and personal growth, and the ability to change and move forward.

Financial Feedback

Work with your finance professionals to establish straightforward methods that attach profit to engagement, customer involvement, and learning. Even better, demonstrate engagement as a profit source rather than an expense. Here is my promise: in almost all cases, you will witness that profits and customer retention closely mirror increases or decreases in employee engagement.

Measuring financial performance can also lead to much-needed revisions in your compensation structures. Measuring engagement, mentorship capabilities, and improved life skills also supports the building of a thoroughly modern and effective workplace.

Celebrate and Praise

These important drivers of success—acknowledgement, praise, and celebration—are still too often overlooked or underemphasized. You need to establish benchmarks in the growth of your workforce engagement solution. Identify the characteristics you want your employees to develop. When you see it happening, celebrate! Acknowledge everyone. Praise people that went above and beyond the expectations. Never fall into a mindless, predictable routine in this area because if someone expects when you are going to say thank you or how we are going to do it, you’ve already lost the special moment as well as the impact. Celebrate creatively and spontaneously. Have a wonderful time. Do it in a way that feeds your soul as much as it feeds the soul of others.

What’s Possible

Let’s return to the facts. Category leaders tend to attract engaged workers. But, if only 13 percent of the world’s workers are engaged, any other organization that hopes to excel must build engaged employees. It will not be enough to simply pay them more because without the culture development, the organization will continue to disengage their talent. For those who roll up the sleeves and do the work, the payoffs will be enormous; the financial, emotional, and spiritual awards beyond generous.

Here is what’s possible.

Tomorrow’s great organizations will be known as much for their employer brand as they are for their customer brand. In fact, consumers will be attracted to and identify with the qualities of the tribe that is built to serve and support them. We are stepping into an era in which a yearning for greater focus on human values is increasing. As artificial intelligence and robotics take over rote and monotonous work, the qualities of wakefulness, connectedness, interest, empathy, enthusiasm, curiosity, creativity, responsiveness, and accountability will not only become the central desire of the consumer, but are the same qualities that make an organization that promotes them a great place to work and build a career.

The healthy workplace will be filled with people who’ve come to terms with ever-increasing change. In organizations that have built “the solution,” we will find talent attracted by the quality and brand of the organization’s mentors. Want to grow a career? Find the mentors who will teach you the skills, give you the role-modeling, and connect you to transforming professional opportunities. It is the quality of your mentors that will determine how quickly you rise or develop comfort and confidence. This is how the world always worked; it was simply obscured in the obtuse workplace left over from the Industrial Revolution.

Mentors have always been the early adopters of success. They have always been the most prized sources of help. We institutionalized cubicles. Why not institutionalize compassion? The organization’s mentors will be the adopters of cultural characteristics and standards of excellence, as well as purveyors of change and engagement. Mentors will be the new elite within the workplace, far more valued than attaining a particular caste on the organizational chart. Of course we will continue valuing what someone did, but we accomplish so much more when we help someone grow into a new and more vital contributor. It is the mentors who take responsibility in helping others become better, stronger, more capable, and more successful. They take newcomers under their wing, and they live for those meaningful moments of uplifting others.

In this new workplace, we don’t encourage our people to learn the skills of communications, sales, presentations, and relationship-building simply to connect with our customers. We teach them so they connect with life and everyone around them. We teach them to present because in so doing, they take ownership of their work. We teach them to sell so they start asking great questions and listen more appreciatively to others. They become keenly aware and skilled in finding others’ needs and expectations. Most of all, we teach them these skills so they can end the dreadful isolation that is sweeping so much of our talent to the sidelines.

In taking this initiative on, we also can require and expect so much more from ourselves and one another. For those who refuse to listen or respond, we don’t have to wait years before their obsolescence becomes blatantly apparent. We build cultures that attract the souls that stand in the open, appreciate being seen and seeing others, and view transparency as the means to stay on top of the waves and thrive. In building tomorrow’s engaged worker, there will be nothing to hide. Talent will no longer be gripped by fear. Flying below the radar will only happen in organizations that also fly below the radar and eventually disappear without a trace.

The mentor-driven, growth-driven culture of tomorrow will not be taken very seriously. If you mean it, you will find someone who is succeeding in every area you want and need to succeed in. What you don’t do is hang out with other workers who are infected with negativity or disengagement. For example, if you want to become a rock star in technology, you find a mentor who is a rock star in technology and you do whatever it takes to carry that person’s water. You follow their instructions. You listen. You study. You are humble and respectful. If not, you are shown the door.

When an egregious customer service incident happens, it will not fly to blame it on the union. As labor laws have developed the sophistication to protect the worker, unions will have to become skilled partners with employers in helping workers embrace active learning, hitting performance standards, and staying competitive with the changing workplace. Absent that, unions will become progressively more outmoded in trying to hold off change through detrimental behavior. It will not be acceptable to blame a lack of training on workers, because engaged workplaces will be filled with individuals who always learning and thus strong in life skills. Other organizations will have to pay more to attract talent in the absence of a great culture, but the best of the best will still not want to work there—or stay there.

Hiring managers will make more skilled hiring and promotion decisions. They also will be aware of their own bias and often will hire more of the people who used to give them pushback. Here’s why. If a candidate has the kind of strong human skills, ethics, and values that will make them a great worker and the organization has a strong mentoring program, why not select that person? In fact, how many more awards, technological breakthroughs, sales, retained customers and other advancements will come out of mentors turning the very workers we might have dismissed into stars? It is mind boggling to think this one through. This is one of the many reasons I propose making mentorship a fiercely important aspect of your culture.

Where does this narrative leave the CEO? Let’s begin by examining the job’s promise.

The title, CEO, implies mastery. As human and organizational evolution accelerates, however, CEOs will be left with no alternative but to demonstrate mastery by continuously developing their own culture. Boards and investors are wising up. They are realizing the connection with the market and profits is determined by the strength of the connection we have with our people. The kind of lazy, cynical, and even contemptuous attitude towards employees is showing up in the bottom line with ferocity. And, as financial and performance oversight becomes more educated about the ways of engagement, expectations will raise around the fact that even an average CEO can lead an awakened, responsive, enthusiastic band of brand ambassadors.

For organizations that dive into The Workplace Engagement Solution, the days of getting rid of employees because they cannot keep up with change will no longer be the routine. Of course, market fluctuations will continue to impact the workforce, and performance challenges will come up. But, the needless loss of institutional knowledge, valued relationships, and cultural depth will be the things that get shown the door. The people who work for us and with us not only learn how to change, but they also will know it is expected, nurtured, rewarded, and required. Our colleagues come with us—sometimes confronted, sometimes inspired, sometimes even dragged—but they will be pulled forward as valued members of the tribe.

Insisting that our cultures become filled with active learners ensures a competitive edge that eludes most organizations today. It also creates environments in which talent is constantly evolving, adapting, growing, and becoming. How exciting! Becoming. No longer waiting, no longer holding on, but learning and becoming.

As the chief human resources officer continues to evolve into a chief talent officer, we will find professionals who work as partners with the business owner or CEO in developing awake, alive, and fully engaged organizations. The talent officer wouldn’t consider taking over the culture. In fact, if a CEO asks someone else to do the job, that person ought to dust off their resume and leave. The fully engaged CEO looks for a savvy, emotionally aware professional to lead the business of people and become an advisor on how to build human capital, grow overall intelligence, produce loyalty, inspire collective courage, make change an attractive adventure, and always protect transparency.

People will not join your organization because they want to set themselves in park and grow old there. People will join your organization because it is the best place to grow. People will join your organization because they can be their absolute best with you.

Consider the alternative: How many of our nation’s consumers have lowered their expectations and think of calling a service provider with dread? How many of us stand in line with a cashier who doesn’t want to be there? How many workers, parents, and families live in a trance because we literally dull their lives for eight hours a day? How many of our valued citizens have fallen into the scourge of under-employment because we didn’t show them how to come along on the journey of change? If we allow this departure to continue, how much will we have to pay in order to take care of them? How many of us are picking up after employees because we didn’t take the initiative to change ourselves?

In the 1980s, I worked with an organization that helped more than 80,000 gays and lesbians come out of the closest. Years later, I was asked what that experience contributed to my work today. I responded, “Everyone who comes into one of our programs is in the closet about something!” They are hiding a dream or aspiration, or they have a precious gift and are afraid of the attention if it comes into the light. Some of them are quietly desperate and unhappy because they are barely meeting the needs of their families. Some have disliked who they work for and observe that nothing changes because it is never voiced. Some have grown bitter because they have always been better than the job at hand but never learned how to get anyone to notice. Yes, in our programs, I have watched thousands of souls step forward and express who they really are, what they are capable of, what they aspire to become, and what they need to learn in order to become their best future selves. The coming out process is the same. There is often the fear of survival and the idea that no one will help them. And then, there is light.

Retooling our talent and our culture will take vision and, above all, courage. Changing ourselves will require the best of our humanity, our humility, and our resourcefulness. Developing cultures that actively build the engaged workforce will exude courageous action on both good and bad days, in wonderful and in terrible markets. We will be required to demonstrate a level of vision that rises far above the quarterly spreadsheet and plans for several years ahead.

So, let me propose that if you have extended the honor and expense of hiring someone into your tribe, that investing in that person’s greatness will only increase the innate value of that decision, that building a mentor-driven, high-standard, radically compassionate, connected, and open culture will also lead to less house-cleaning and more exciting opportunities.

Can such organizations save lives? Absolutely.

Will such organizations become category leaders? Of course they will.

Actually, they will accomplish far more. We will build new economies. We will build a future devoid of patronizing promises to the past and filled with a courageous vision of what we have earned through our hard work.

The “trance” simply must end.

Many have asked me if The Workplace Engagement Solution is written for CEOs or human resource professionals or people who want to become more engaged.

Actually, I have written it for anyone who will listen.