12
IF YOU WERE CEO FOR A DAY
Glassdoor is an online provider of various workforce services, one of which is offering current and former employees a way to rate their organizations. Then others who are considering applying to work at that organization can go online to check ratings and see if that company is a fit.
Raters can remark on the company’s pros and cons, provide advice to management, and then rate categories on a 5-point scale, including career opportunities, compensation and benefits, work/life balance, senior management, culture and values, the company’s CEO, and if they would recommend the company to a friend.
If you were the CEO, you would be advised to monitor your company’s Glassdoor results closely. And the last data piece you should care about is employees’ evaluations of you as their CEO. It’s not that you shouldn’t care what employees think of you, but instead that it’s employees’ opinions about their direct supervisors that most strongly influences their overall work experience as shown in chapter 2. So what Glassdoor would tell you is if you have the right supervisors in place.
In fact, it might be fair to say that Glassdoor results don’t tell us as much about organizations as they do about whether the employee providing the review drew the long or short straw—whether they got a good supervisor or a jerk boss.
So to improve engagement as the CEO, you would need a process, a way to consistently provide metrics and tools for every one of your managers to help them succeed.
Introducing Finnegan’s Arrow
Let’s take the likely bet that you will implement all of the ideas in this book, raise your employees’ engagement levels to the sky, and ultimately earn a promotion to CEO. Your job, then, would include developing a surefire set of processes to consistently improve employee engagement because we know that’s a surefire way to increase productivity and profits. Finnegan’s Arrow provides the way, as seen in Figure 12.1.
Finnegan’s Arrow provides a process and a roadmap for improving both engagement and retention in organizations. What distinguishes Finnegan’s Arrow from other ineffective processes is that it is business-driven.
Why is it that we manage sales, service, quality, and safety by putting goals into place, develop carefully scrutinized reports, and ultimately hold people accountable for achieving the right numbers? The answer, of course, is because it works. Management guru Peter Drucker taught us so.
Yet engagement and retention continue on a dead-end road, paved by one-size-fits-all employee program “solutions.” Finnegan’s Arrow offers a new, highly effective way that works. Here’s how:
Costs means converting engagement and turnover to dollars so CEOs and CFOs reduce their complacent use of worthless benchmarks. Instead, they are motivated by the harsh news that disengagement and turnover cost real money.
Goals then direct CEOs to establish targets for engagement and retention, just like they do for sales, service, and other top-5 metrics.
Stay interviews become the primary tool for leaders to learn specifically how to better engage and retain each member of their teams.
Forecasts provide leaders with another business-driven solution to predict and in a subtle way commit to how long each employee will stay—and whether they will score in the top box on the next engagement survey.
The final component is ACCOUNTABILITY, followed by arrows back to Goals and Forecasts. Chapter 2 taught us that you are your company’s best tool and best resource for improving engagement, and that the single most important thing you can do is build trust with your team. But today you are CEO, and as the top exec, the absolute most profound step you can take to improve engagement for your organization is to hold each leader accountable for improving their score—and for building engagement with each member of their teams.
The two arrows beneath Accountability reveal the business-driven capacity of Finnegan’s Arrow. Leaders on all levels are accountable for various goals, and they usually adjust to achieve new ones once they know the accountability is real. In this case, accountability for engagement goals and forecasts directly matches the way organizations manage sales. Salespeople are driven by goals, and they forecast future sales, both to alert those above them and to establish short-term goals for themselves. Those who succeed on goals and forecasts win trips to Hawaii, while those who miss sometimes lose their jobs.
Those managers who achieve engagement goals and forecasts likely won’t win trips abroad, but they are the ones who will increase your company’s profits and also make you look good on Glassdoor as your company’s CEO.
You return to your real job, though, once the clock strikes midnight. That job includes raising your employee engagement survey score, and my mission in this book is to give you precise, near-perfect tools to do so, based on indisputable research regarding what really works. Let’s take a summary look:
1. Your employees must trust you first and trust the people you put next to them second.
2. You must build skills to hire applicants who turn on their own engagement switch.
3. Stay interviews and their associated smart solutions ramp up each employee’s survey score.
4. Those scores will sink if you fail to act on poor performers.
5. Sponsor your company’s various programs to leverage the heaps of money they spend on them.
6. Discipline yourself with goals and forecasts so you keep engagement front of mind.
7. Coach subordinate supervisors based on their abilities to build trust and grow top performers.
8. Stretch your engagement-building investment with stronger metrics than your company gives you.
Good luck . . . and go make your own luck! I look forward to hearing from you and stand by to help: