March 2015 – Performance Management Company Blog

Since much of my thinking involves the workplace and engagement and productivity, and my blog IS about People and Performance, I thought to increase your understanding of how things really work with a simple illustration and quote.

It’s also Friday the 13th so I also thought that people might be searching for meaningfulness in the world around us. SO, here is a simple illustration of one of my most favorite and useful quotes when one is searching for meaning in the events of the workplace:

Remember that caterpillars can fly if they would just lighten up.

And remember that we all need a little levity and a better understanding of how things got to be how they are and where we are heading in the future. It should be obvious that we can make changes to make improvements,

For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.

 Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s quips and quotes on Poems on The Workplace is here.

Square Wheels are a trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO Group

Engagement – The Day AFTER National Employee Appreciation Day

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 10, 2015

In Change, Change Facilitation, dis-un-empowerment, dis-un-engagement, employee motivation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, motivational team building exercises

I popped up a short post on doing a Day of Un-Appreciation every year, with the idea that doing a day of appreciation is only one day of many and that it should certainly be more common. People are not being involved or engaged or motivated well in their workplaces, and managements are apparently choosing not to do things differently (or things would improve!).

This morning, I framed up another idea:

What if we simply doubled the days that we thought about appreciating employees, you know, those people that actually do the actual work of organizations and not the management of those people… (grin)

There is simply so much more that so many more could do to help the process of generating better workplace engagement.

As an addendum, let me share a graph from the Gallup organization that showed a recent high bump in engagement in the US, something that some people are apparently celebrating.

Gallup National Data on employee engagement levels

graph is linked to original article

The rise in apparent engagement is most assuredly not a “leap” and it also correlates with the drop in un-employment (so some new hires might appear in the survey data) along with a drop in the numbers of under-employed, meaning that additional workers started making more money.

So, don’t think that there have been a lot of improvements in how people are being managed nor in how people are being appreciated. There is a great need for companies to understand that managers can choose to do things differently to dis-un-engage and dis-un-empower their people on a day to day basis.

Check out our toolkit for involving and engaging people for workplace improvement. $20!

For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.

 Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s quips and quotes on Poems on The Workplace is here.

Square Wheels are a trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO Group

National Employee UN-Appreciation DAY needed

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 10, 2015

In employee motivation, Engagement, intrinsic motivation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, people and performance

This will be a short post and one focused on something I see as a pretty important issue.

Today was apparently a National Day for employee appreciation here in the US, and maybe elswewhere. To some, that might sound like a really good idea. But I look at a large body of data that basically supports the idea that a lot of workplaces are not all that great for engagement and motivation.

So, the idea is that it is a good thing that we should spend ONE day and appreciate workers? One day of 220?

In my way of thinking, maybe we need to spend ONE day when we do NOT appreciate employees, just to do something different. Every other day, we should go out of our way to recognize those people who choose to do more than that required of them, to those people who show inititive and develop ideas for improvement.

Ya think?

For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.

Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s quips and quotes on Poems on The Workplace is here.

Square Wheels are a trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO Group

Team Building and Engagement Workshop at IAPPD-MENA in Amman in May, 2015

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 6, 2015

In business team building exercises, Corporate Team Building Games, Leadership Development Game, Square Wheels LEGO images, team building exercises for the workplace, The Search for The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine

I am excited to have the chance to present in a new venue, Amman, Jordan at the International Association for People and Performance Development. The goals of the organization align closely with what I have been working on since 1978. The organization was actually started by my old friend and colleague, Geoff Cook, who was unfortunately killed in a car accident last year but who had invited me to be on the Board of Governors. So, I am really pleased to get my association with the association rolling along.

On May 4, I will be presenting a session using my Square Wheels development tools in the morning, running it as both a workshop and a train-the-trainer program (and giving participants a toolkit) and then delivering my team building game, The Search for the Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, as the closing part of the day and an attempt to pull things all together.

There will be three presenters, each of us having one day. Paul will focus on leadership, I focus on teamwork and engagement, and Raed focuses on managing and leading change. It should be great!

You can see a short video of my overview by clicking on this text or the link below:

If you are looking for an adventure in learning, join us in Amman, Jordan in early May,

For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.

 Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s quips and quotes on Poems on The Workplace is here.

Square Wheels are a trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO Group

Better Roadblock Management – Dis-Un-Empowerment and Square Wheels

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 5, 2015

In Brainstorming techniques, Change Facilitation, dis-un-empowerment, dis-un-engagement, Facilitation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator

My regular readers know that I use images and metaphors to express a lot of my thinking. My basic metaphor for how things work looks like this:

Square Wheels One LEGO image by Scott Simmerman

Square Wheels are the way things really work, and the Round Wheels are already in the wagon. Don’t just DO something, Stand there!

For 20+ years, I have been playing with issues of empowerment and engagement and team building, using cartoons and games to drive out desired behavior and produce better communications and alignment to goals and missions. I take the low road on all this, working hard to keep things really simple because I find that things ARE really simple.

If we are going to motivate and engage people in the workplace, it seems critical that we need to focus on removing the things that people perceive as getting in the way. So many people are un-empowered and un-engaged and it is necessary for their managers to actively involve them and to change or remove the perceived issues and roadblocks.

While one cannot empower or engage anyone directly, they can certainly coach and assist them in changing their beliefs and shifting their thoughts toward going #morebetterfaster, right?

In moving from my line-art representations to serious playing with LEGO block images and themes, we have upgraded some of our simple toolkits and support frameworks. Right now, we have the Stupidly Simple Square Wheels Toolkit (a very simple communications tool) packaged and on the website with the online training program found at The Square Wheels Project.

We have reworked all the materials in the Managing Workplace Roadblocks Toolkit, which is a neat expansion of a package of tools that has worked so well to dis-un-empower people and workplace improvement ideas. It shares a workable model and various support materials about how to frame workplace issues so that individuals and teams can deal with them effectively.

The model uses LEGO pieces to represent the roadblocks, with images in powerpoint to generate discussions along with worksheets for use in processing the ideas. It is easily linked to the various tools in the LEGO Serious Play® frameworks.

There is more to come, and a slideshare program and maybe a short video describing how things can change and how managers can more effectively involve their people in workplace improvement ideas, along with team building and coaching frameworks,

For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.

A detailed profile can be found at my LinkedIn page

 Connect with Scott on Google+

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Scott’s quips and quotes on Poems on The Workplace is here.

Square Wheels are a trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® and LEGO Serious Play are trademarks of The LEGO Group

The Workplace and the Work – Thoughts on the 8-hour day

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 2, 2015

In Change, Engagement, people and performance, productivity improvement, Statistics on workplaces

I’ve posted up a number of things about the workplace over the years, and also about a lot of the current-day issues of over-connectedness and the average 72-hour workweek of many managers.

This is reflected in this article from last year – Working while Not Working – The Problem of Overconnectedness – which shared a bunch of statistics and issues and data.

I came across another interesting site that I thought to share, one that focused on general thinking about The Workweek and that shared some interesting thoughts on our assumptions.

Why do we have 8 hour work days in the first place?

How do we spend out time? This image is from the article by Leo Widrich:

Widrich writes with the idea that workers or managers somehow have a choice about their workweek. Maybe that is true, but there is a LOT of data that suggests that the average worker is a LOT more connected and involved than that simple 8 or 9-hour workday.

Many of us own our own businesses, and my week is pretty much described as, “always.” I will respond to email on Saturday night at midnight and work 6 hours on a Sunday before turning on the TV and watching a movie while I write this blog. How can one even calculate how many hours a week I am connected in some manner to the business?

I DO like a lot of his recommendations, which I adaptively reproduce below. Read his original article for a lot more ideas:

The top 4 tips for improving your work day

I’ve started to make 4 distinct changes to implement the above research better. Here is what worked the best:

Manually increase the relevance of a task: Now, a lot of us still might struggle to find the focus, especially if no one set a deadline to it. Overriding your attention system, and adding your own deadline together with a reward has shown some of the most significant improvements for task completion.

Split your day into 90 min window. Instead of looking at a 8, 6 or 10 hour work day, split it down and say you’ve got 4, 5 or however many 90 minute windows. That way you will be able to have 4 tasks that you can get done every day much more easily.

Plan your rest so you actually rest: “The fittest person is not the one who runs the fastest, but the one who has optimized their rest time.” Says Tony Schwartz. A lot of the time, we are so busy planning our work day, that we forget about “how” to rest. Plan beforehand what you will do your rest. Here are some ideas: Nap, read, meditate, get a snack.

Zero notifications: One of the best ideas I’ve ever had was to follow Joel’s advice on Zero Notifications. Having absolutely no counter on my phone or computer changing from 0 to 1 and always breaking my focus has been a huge help. If you haven’t tried this yet, try to turn off every digital element that could become an alert.

The comments to his post are also very interesting. People have a lot of different perspectives on things.

My guess is that a lot of us have already adapted his as well as our own ideas toward managing our work. I’ve been in my business 31+ years and guess that I keep things at least somewhat in balance. I was going to the gym 5 or 6 hours a week but that ended because I blogged about Planet Fitness and some issues of trust, respect and engagement related to their leadership that were pretty obviously poor in the impacts on their workers. Those workers have some obvious issues of being poorly managed, in my opinion.

I also edited an older blog of mine to capture some ideas about how we can look toward making the workplace a more involved and engaged place and how to improve motivation. You can find “The Future of Work…” here.

And, I was sent a link to a short slideshare on the work environment, focused on furniture and lighting and design. I thought it was interesting. You can find that here.

Now, I guess I will add in more bicycling and kayaking to the schedule, along with the pool and the gardening. While there is always something to get done, some of it can wait. But call me any time and I will answer,

For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.

Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s quips and quotes on Poems on The Workplace is here.

Thoughts on Square Wheels and Blended Learning and Facilitation Skills

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 1, 2015

In Change Facilitation, employee motivation, Engagement, experiential learning, innovation, Manager as Trainer

I continue to throw mud at the wire fence, looking for where the stick is the greatest and expecting rain. Normal progress, it would seem. Movement here, movement there, movement in many places. We’re just not all assembled into an operating paradigm as of yet.

The business applications of all this stuff are widespread, and I would like to take my interests and frameworks to a slightly different place, one focused on building facilitation and workplace improvement skills.

Two weeks ago, I completed a course on Moodle, with my focus being on trying out ideas for a simple course on facilitation and engagement that uses my cartoons as visual anchors for group discussions. The goal of using eLearning is to package a stupidly simple but bombproof overview of how to use the cartoon in the context of facilitating a group meeting of issues and opportunities for workplace improvement.

The design is to get a worksheet into the hands of workers to capture some of their ideas about how things work and what might be done differently. Here is what the worksheet looks like, asking people how the illustration might show how most organizations really work:

I am taking this #blendkit2015 course as a way of gaining a bit more perspective on building the back-end, the interactive and collaborative part of my Square Wheels Facilitation Course.

So far, it looks like a good idea. Yeah, I will get a Badge for completing parts of the program, but that is also one of the things that I want to do with my Moodle Course, to give people badges of completion anchored to the development of their skills in involving and engaging other people, in asking and not telling. That should pay multiple dividends to many people in most workplaces.

Today, I took my thinking a bit farther, thinking of the situation more like this:

So, my thinking is on herding cats and frogs and moving all this forward, looking for a way to go more global with these tools and impact more people for workplace improvement. If you are interested in playing with these ideas with me, let me know. I am looking for some collaborative partnership to involve, engage and motivate workplaces with these simple tools.

What ideas are you having about the Blended Learning 2015 MOOC from the Canvas Network and UCF and how you might apply it to your issues, opportunities and organizations?

Please make your comments in the Comments Section below. I moderate to prevent spamming but will approve any and all good thoughts on these issues,

For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.

 Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s quips and quotes on Poems on The Workplace is here.

Square Wheels are a trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO Group

Beautiful Math – Euler's Law and Square Wheels

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 1, 2015

In employee motivation, intrinsic motivation, Metaphors for business improvement, team motivation

This post is a little off the beaten path for the blog but I thought that this article was really pretty interesting and easy to understand. I like it because of how cleanly and simply it explains some really complicated but elegant math.

Like my Square Wheels theme, I really like things that are simple and elegant and this little equation:

e^iπ + 1 = 0
(e to the i times pi plus 1 = zero)

is pretty amazing, as well as very common in the world as we know it!

It is an equation about numbers, constants “pi” and “e” — you can remember the latter from Einstein’s famous equation. Both are transcendental in that they are infinite quantities when expressed in decimal form. You will know pi from the simple math about circles, though. “e” is about compound interest, Moore’s Law and everything that moves about and accelerates.

Leonard Euler figured this out in 1748. Basically, pi and e are connected in a dimension perpendicular to the world, a place that is measured in units of i (the square root of -1, an imaginary number which actually does not exist. But its expression in visual forms is amazing:

Check out this article by Lee Simmons for a more detailed explanation and some more graphic representations of how this simple equation explains so much about the world of math and physics and our understanding of how things really work. Beautiful stuff, for sure, like my Square Wheels representations of how things really work:

In Square Wheels, things will just roll on and on and on and on unless someone takes the time to stop the wagon and look for opportunities for improvement and change the math. The round wheels already exist…

Euler’s Law and Square Wheels roll on,

For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.

 Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s quips and quotes on Poems on The Workplace is here.

Square Wheels are a trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO Group

Note:

Pi goes on to infinity. A few digits are here and you can find it out to one million numbers at this website. Infinity is SO large that, when letters are expressed as digital numbers (a = 1, b = 2, etc.), you can find the entire contents of War and Peace expressed digitally in sequence within its string of numbers. In fact, infinity is SO large that you can find the contents of War and Peace along with all of my blog posts in sequence. It is an unimaginably large number…

3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360011330530548820466521384146951941511609...

Ideas on People and Performance, Team Building, Motivation and Innovation

Month: March 2015

A Square Wheels Quote on Meaningfulness

Engagement – The Day AFTER National Employee Appreciation Day

National Employee UN-Appreciation DAY needed

Team Building and Engagement Workshop at IAPPD-MENA in Amman in May, 2015

Better Roadblock Management – Dis-Un-Empowerment and Square Wheels

The Workplace and the Work – Thoughts on the 8-hour day

Why do we have 8 hour work days in the first place?

Thoughts on Square Wheels and Blended Learning and Facilitation Skills

Beautiful Math – Euler's Law and Square Wheels