Category: dis-un-engagement Page 1 of 5

David Riklin caught my attention a while ago with one of those quotes that says a lot more than it says. So, I added it into my catalog of Square Wheels® Posters and something to add to our Culture Wall idea of motivational and developmental Square Wheels themes.

Organizational alignment and culture change can look like this, in actuality:

(If you would like a free high res version of the above, email Scott@squarewheels.com)

Shared conversations about missions and visions, and shared perceptions about issues and opportunities can allow a group of people to align together to work on implementation. This builds teamwork and engagement.

Workplace conversations related to the perceived issues can be part of your effort to dis-un-engage people, to identify and remove those things that are decrease engagement and generate frustration or withdrawal. You can read more about Dis-Un-Engagement, motivation and workplace performance improvement here.

I’ve been playing with communications tools for 25+ years and these toolkits on Square Wheels are cheap and amazingly flexible. They are useful when getting managers to be more motivating and work great for innovation and creativity facilitation.

You can also see a cute animation of “Continuous Continuous Improvement” here: https://www.squarewheels.com/

You can see us playing with Santa’s Performance Improvement Culture Wall in this cute little blog post.

—

For the FUN of It!

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

See my 90-minute teambuilding game, The Collaboration Journey Challenge

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com
See his poems and performance haiku poems at www.poemsontheworkplace.com

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

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

Dr. Seuss on Disruptive Engagement

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On July 6, 2017

In Articles on Teamwork, Business Haiku, Change Facilitation, dis-un-empowerment, dis-un-engagement, Disruptive Engagement, employee motivation, Facilitation, improve organizational performance, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, Managing and leading change, Organizational Development Tools

Even Dr. Seuss would understand about the issues and opportunities around the positive impacts of supervisors leading more active involvement to make impacts on people and performance. The data are simply so clear that people DO have ideas for improvement but that no one in the organization facilitates the process of capturing those ideas. Thus, there are large gaps in innovation and quality and productivity because possibilities simply are not realized.

I’ve blogged elsewhere about the general idea of Disruptive Engagement but I thought that one image, simplifying to the stupidly understandable level, might generate some actual thinking about choices and doing things differently! (grin)

People have ideas for improvement, the Round Wheels are already in the wagon. But they interact with their supervisors, who generally choose to NOT do things differently because of risk or time or task interference or the lack of collaboration from other departments. “I’m here from Human Resources to help you,” is such a “reality joke” in so many places because they are structurally unable to help, too.

If things are going to improve, it is going to be the people who choose to improve things. And it is going to come from increased collaboration and alignment to shared goals. Do some effective team building (see why I hate outdoor activities)!

Facilitate Dis-UN-engagement and Dis-UN-empowerment with your people by choosing to actively involve them in some workplace improvement activities. Visit The Square Wheels Project for some simple tools and support,

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.

Scott and Dan Stones built The Square Wheels Project as an LMS, sharing tools and training to support Disruptive Engagement in the workplace.

Visit The Square Wheels Project at www.TheSquareWheelsProject.com

 Connect with Scott on Google+

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

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

The Hubcap Report – a note on Task Interference and Supervisors

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On June 22, 2017

In Change Facilitation, dis-un-engagement, Disruptive Engagement, employee motivation, empowerment, Facilitation, improve organizational performance, manager as motivator, people and performance

These days, my focus continues to be on people and performance, with more consideration around The Supervisor and their work to dis-un-engage and actively involve their people in workplace improvements. I blogged last week about the concept of Free The Supervisor.

If we want to improve engagement, the only people who will do this are the ones that have direct contact with the employees. All the rest is window dressing and no amount spent on surveys will accomplish anything without the vesting of those front line managers.

The reality is that so many things get in the way of them doing anything differently. And I am actively collecting data in this regard, trying to identify some of the things they do that block them from doing new things. And a conversation with David Zinger of the Employee Engagement Network this morning got me thinking of one of those classic examples of this kind of meaningless required goop.

The Hubcap Report

Note: This actually happens to you, if you are a manager, but you call it something else and the names and faces are changed.

I am working with one of the Bell operating companies working on the outside plant that supports the telephone wires and all that stuff. In particular, I am working with one of the supervisors and his manager and looking at ideas for impacting motivation and performance results. We have really good support from the management team to try to do some things differently and I have good access to the managers.

So, early for a scheduled meeting and sitting in the District Manager’s office and talking with his secretary, I spy what looks to be an interesting series of notebooks labeled Hubcap Report. So, I ask her about them and she pulls the latest one down. Inside are a series of bi-weekly reports from all 12 garages listing the trucks with a check mark if they have hubcaps. Years of reports.

Digging down, one of the former DMs in visiting a garage noted that some of the vehicles were missing hubcaps so he had asked the garage managers to get them fixed and to send him a report. That request became a process, done by each supervisor every two weeks, signed off by their manager and forwarded to the District Office where they were stored in this notebook. The current DM never even knew they existed and the secretary simply filed them, not knowing how silly they were to keep doing.

How many of YOUR supervisors are completing reports and sending them upward, with no clear purpose and minimal impact?

And, on meetings and time and costs in general, HBR had a report about an analysis of a large organization and the costs to prepare senior executives for their peer-group weekly meetings. Note that little actually gets done from these meetings, other than the sharing of information and the occasional planning of a new strategy. THESE ARE COSTS, NOT IMPACTS:

In this particular company, a total of 7,000 person-hours per year were spent in weekly executive committee meetings at which 11 senior staff members provided updates on the business to themselves. To prepare for these meetings, these senior staffers held 11 of their own unit staff meetings consuming 1,800 person-hours each, for a total of 20,000 hours per year.

To get ready for the unit meetings, a total of 21 managers working for the senior staffers held their own meetings, 21 of them, for a combined total of 63,000 hours per year. Of course these unit meetings, being important, required “prep meetings” themselves, often involving supervisors.

There were thus 130 prep meetings in total, consuming a total of 210,000 hours per year. T0 summarize, it looks like this:

7,000 hours: Weekly executive committee meetings.
20,000 hours: Weekly senior staff unit meetings.
63,000 hours: Weekly meetings of the staff to the senior staff
210,000 hours: Weekly prep meetings for the staff to the senior staff.

FREE THE SUPERVISORS!

Help them to see out of the box they find they are in. Give them some perspective and even some hope that things may get better.

And look for simple solutions to some of the issues. Look at the things you can eliminate. Stop doing the things that do not have real impact. Maybe even BLOCK some of the extra-departmental information requests that will have NO positive impacts on YOUR team’s results. It is simply so easy for someone in staff to ask for information and so easy to take up your people’s time with those requests.

Start doing some active involvement. Start doing some team building — our Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine activity is fabulous. Take a look at the communications and engagement tools at The Square Wheels Project. But whatever you DO choose to do, do something that will improve motivation and performance!

Any kind of real collaboration and employee engagement at the front lines is likely being blocked by things that have little impact on your organization.

Use this process of facilitating dis-un-engagement to implement some real improvements,

For the FUN of It!

 Connect with Scott on Google+

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

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

Radical Candor and Disruptive Engagement

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On April 19, 2017

In Change, Change Facilitation, dis-un-engagement, employee motivation, Facilitation

Reading a review by Ted Kinni on Kim Scott’s book, Radical Candor, pushed me to publish this short post on impacting workplace performance through conversation and engagement. Her book is well grounded in the nightmare of many typical workplaces and how a lack of good conversations causes such harm.

As Ted writes, “Radical candor stems from Scott’s conviction that interpersonal relationships are the currency of management. “They determine whether you can fulfill your three responsibilities as a manager: 1) to create a culture of guidance (praise and criticism) that will keep everyone moving in the right direction; 2) to understand what motivates each person on your team well enough to avoid burnout or boredom and keep the team cohesive; and 3) to drive results collaboratively,” she writes.”

To deliver that radical candor, a manager must care personally and challenge directly; it is about giving a damn and caring about impacts. It is about coaching for improved workplace performance and sharing observations and feedback.

And this meshes with my thinking in other posts about the issues around issues of personal accountability and action (see “If not you, WHO? If not now, WHEN?“ here). People need to step up, and this needs to happen at the worker / manager interface, not just at some middle-management level or by one of the executives. The real work of involvement and motivation and performance improvement gets done at the bottom of the organization, not from some tops-down kind of communication. And a failure to execute at the bottom will not be corrected with another million dollars spent on some organizational attitude survey.

The real work gets done at the bottom of the organization, face to face, and not tops-down.

Tops-down, Big Corporate Solutions simply do not work to improve much. Sure, for implementing radical organization-wide changes, some percentage of tops-down strategy improvement initiatives are eventually successful (maybe 40% after 3 years of focus). But with my 34 years in the people and performance business, nothing seems to have worked over the years in actually improving active involvement and engagement of the front-line workers, who continue to be about 1/3 engaged. And this after corporations have spent billions on surveys and other tops-down tools and consultants and messaging.

What is needed is some chaos. What is needed is some Disruptive Engagement* at the front lines. Why not allow the people who know what they could be doing differently to involve themselves in conversations with their manager about issues and opportunities. Sure, some of those ideas might clang, or they might need some support from other departments or above to implement.

But if we are not looking for solutions or challenging the way we are doing things, we are simply dying a slow death, one that makes a workplace an insufferable environment and one that stifles innovation and creativity. Let people’s ideas count for something!

The Round Wheels are already in the wagon!

So, encourage your managers and those around you to have some candid conversations around issues and opportunities. Let people suggest ideas for improvement. ALLOW them to be more involved and to work together to make things better, even though there may be some disruption of existing systems and processes.

You can find some simple tools and elegant instruction at The Square Wheels Project.

For the FUN of It!

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

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/

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

* Disruptive Engagement can be loosely defined as allowing people to take a look at the issues and opportunities for identifying and implementing ideas for workplace improvement done at the very bottom of an organization, without the “helpful” control systems of HR or T&D or other more senior, bureaucratic groups. It is somewhat analogous to Disruptive Innovation.

Links:

Review by Ted Kinni is here: https://www.strategy-business.com/article/Why-Managers-Cant-Skimp-on-Radical-Candor

Book by Kim Scott is here: http://us.macmillan.com/radicalcandor/kimscott/9781250103505/

If not you, WHO? If not now, WHEN?

Engagement – Think Local, Act Local

If not you, WHO? If not now, WHEN?

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 14, 2017

In Change Facilitation, dis-un-engagement, employee engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, improve organizational performance, intrinsic motivation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, Metaphors for business improvement, people and performance, Square Wheels LEGO images, team motivation

If not you, WHO?
If not now, WHEN?

I love that short little quote about personal accountability and action. Of course, we can always wait for someone else or we can simply choose to wait, which tends to be the most common response of people to opportunities. Lots of statistics point to the small numbers of “early adapters” of new programs or organizational change efforts while the bulk of managers simply sit and watch to see the results.

But, if things are going to change, someone needs to make them change.

If it is to be, it is up to me!

Otherwise, things will just roll like they have always rolled., which in my view of the world tends to look like this:

Things tend to roll along like they always have and why not. Things stay the same unless they change… And the continuous un-engagement of the wagon pushers is no surprise, since their view of the future tends to be, “boards and hands.”

Most wagon pulling leaders work hard, pulling the wagon and trusting that the measurements and expectations and performance appraisal mechanisms will insure that the people at the back are pushing instead of pulling. After all, what choice do they have? So, they simply keep pulling, hoping that things will always be okay.

But let’s challenge these assumptions. Let’s assume that day after day, month after month, year after year, all this gets really old and somewhat de-motivating. New hires become dis-engaged over about 6 months and regress to the average enthusiasm of the other workers even as their skill levels increase. And, the good workers will tend to blame their wagon pullers for a lot of the communications issues.

How bad is it? I share some stats in my post of a few days ago (here) but two that stand out are these:

• 35% of US workers would forgo a raise to see their boss fired.
• 3 of 4 workers say that their boss is the worst / most stressful part of the job.

This all begs the question of what might be done differently to generate improvements, basically, The Who and The When.

DDI recently shared some statistics that suggested only 11% of supervisors get management training. So, we can guess that support for skill development will not be coming soon from Training and Development / HR. Nothing new there… They simply have other priorities.

The reality is that people will continue to come into the workplace dragging. And if nothing changes, nothing changes. They are, for the most part (70%), un-engaged, un-enthused and un-involved, and the best predictor of the future is the past.

So, who other than their supervisor can change things? How can that supervisor become a Draggin’ Slayer and choose to do things that might DIS-un-engage them and generate some active involvement around identifying the Square Wheels^® that exist and the Round Wheels we always find inside the wagon?

Which, when facilitated with active questioning and group involvement, can begin to break the ice around communicating about issues and opportunities. It is NOT instantaneous in some workgroups where there is hostility of a lack of trust, but it DOES work if we keep asking questions and responding positively to the initial ideas. The process itself is pretty bombproof.

Having been around corporations and other businesses for 35 years, I actually see NO real solution to the issues we face in motivating and involving workers other than through the direct actions of supervisors.

Operations have always been this way; exemplary performers doing things differently than everyone else and exemplary supervisors choosing to defend their top performers from “corporate bureaucracy” — and simply managing people better. The best managers have always gotten people talking about Square Wheels and playing with Round Wheel ideas for improvement.

We simply cannot go #morebetterfaster if we continue to do the same things the same way and wait for help from above. It just is not going to happen! Our better managers ask questions and solicit ideas from their people, generating motivation and innovation. You simply cannot drive this from a tops-down approach since you can never reach the people who are doing the work.

If you can share a more effective or impactful approach to involving and engaging people in the workplace, why not contribute a comment? Workers DO have ideas about improving their workplace and impacting quality and productivity. Working together can foster teamwork and peer support and many of the other intrinsically motivating aspects linked to accomplishments.

Building communications and trust between workers and managers is an important factor in employee retention and skill development and cascades into innovation and service quality and customer retention.

We offer a SIMPLE toolkit for facilitation skills development at The Square Wheels Project. For a tiny bit of money, supervisors can gain access to an online course and also the powerpoint and handout sheets needed to have a productive and engaging meeting (or meetings, actually) with their people about issues and opportunities for workplace improvement.

If we can encourage our supervisors and managers to think differently and go off on their own paths to improving involvement and engagement and motivation of their people, is there really any downside? I guess you could call this empowerment. But how else are we going to take advantage of our human capital and go #morebetterfaster? The managers should be the motivators.

Share your thoughts and reactions,

For the FUN of It!

One of the best teambuilding exercises in the world, as rated by his users, is The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, which focuses on leadership, collaboration, alignment and focuses on implementing the collective performance optimization ideas.

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

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/

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

Spring Forward Monday™ is March 13, 2017 – A Square Wheels® Solution

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 2, 2017

In dis-un-engagement, employee engagement, employee engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, improve organizational performance, innovation, intrinsic motivation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, motivation in the workplace, motivational team building exercises, people and performance, Spring Forward Monday, Square Wheels LEGO images, team building exercises, team motivation, The Square Wheels Project

Okay, March 13 is a Monday. But it is also the Monday after Sunday morning’s loss of an hour’s sleep as we set the clocks ahead each Spring. AND, it will be one of the low productivity workdays, since you know people will be dragging. (How many do you think will go to bed an hour earlier on Saturday night? Plus, there are lots of statistics on the measured impacts!)

So, with most people dragging, and this to be a known problem, why not choose to do something differently? Why not recharge their batteries and increase involvement (known to be low in general) and motivation (generally low) and teamwork (sometimes very spotty) by having a meeting focused on their issues and their ideas for improvement?

Choose to be a Draggin’ Slayer. Seize The Day! Choose to focus on rebuilding some energy and gaining ideas for improvement.

You can probably expect some low energy from your people. But our experiences show that this will be short-lived as people get involved with the Square Wheels^® metaphor as a vehicle to discuss issues and problems — and there are lots of Square Wheels out there! Simply talking about perceived Square Wheels will generate many Round Wheel solutions to make things roll more better faster.

People want to make improvements and people will work on teams to look at the ideas for improvement and offer ideas for implementation. It is just that they need the collective thinking of the group to really understand the issues more clearly and to better define some solutions.

And it is a fact that people are pretty good problem solvers, when they know that something IS a problem and they have perspective and resources and support. They can find solutions and if the solutions are their idea, they will be more motivated to implement those ideas. It is an issue of ownership and active involvement; you really cannot push them to make improvements you think are needed, since they resist your changes…

Nobody ever washes a rental car.

So, it is about choice. Your choice to simply continue to do things the same way or to involve and engage your people to look at things from different perspectives and define some issues and refine some ideas for workplace improvement. This kind of session can be held at the front-line worker level or even among the top management team, although workplace realities would suggest that the people pushing the wagon know a lot more about the realities and problems than the wagon pullers.

Most organizations do have the tendency to work like this and we will note that our experience proves that the Round Wheels are already in the wagon — those good ideas already exist. It is simply a matter of identification of the better ideas once the bad ones are recognized for what they are.

The reality is that the Square Wheels^® actually DO work, they just do not work smoothly…

Square Wheels One is a metaphor for performance improvement by Scott Simmerman

Square Wheels® One is our main illustration about how things really work.

So, with that perception about how things really work, you can use your imagination to guess at what might be done differently. You can choose to be a Draggin’ Slayer on Spring Forward Monday™ or continue to let things thump and bump. You can choose to improve involvement and engagement by involving and engaging your people in a new vision of how things can roll to the goal.

People WANT to be involved. Even the ones that say they don’t will get involved and engaged, since they so-often complain about how things are working and this is the perfect venue for them to contribute! So choose to involve everyone. Let people make some better choices and own the process of implementing workplace improvement.

If we have gotten you interested, here are some simple resources. One is a 2-minute video overview of the whole idea.

You can also purchase a complete $25 toolkit to support your effort with our metaphors and materials. The package contains:

The Square Wheels One image
A Leader’s Guide for facilitating the session
Participant Worksheets/Handouts
A collection of Square Wheels Posters that can be used as anchors to the insights gained as the group rolls down the road.

And, you can access The Square Wheels Project to complete a 30-minute optional course on facilitating workplace improvement through facilitation. It is a general course, but focused on our metaphors and worksheets. And it costs only $10 as we gain traction for our approach to organizational performance improvement and motivation of workplaces.

We are working hard to make this simple tool available directly to supervisors and managers who need simple and effective tools for motivating their people. Doing this on Spring Forward Monday™ would be a nice touch, but doing one of these sessions any time would be impactful.

For the FUN of It!

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

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Co.
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO Group

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Presenteeism – They are IN but they are OUT

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On May 12, 2016

In Change Facilitation, dis-un-engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, improve organizational performance, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, people and performance, productivity improvement, workplace performance improvement

I was reading some news feeds and came across the word, “Presenteeism” in an HR thread. The term was new to me, but since I was gathering some notes around the theme of involvement and engagement, it resonated. The common use is seemingly around working while sick and is seen as the opposite and related problem to absenteeism.

I think the term is much bigger than that and that presenteeism is much more prevalent than commonly thought. I want to expand and relate the term to issues of people and performance in general.

Repeatedly, we see that only about 1/3 of workers are engaged with work. Others are not engaged and some are even anti-engaged to the point where they are actively working against the organization. You can see a bit more on this if you read my blog about sabotage or if you google “workplace sabotage” or even search on issues around part-time employment problems. Those anti-organization workers are few in number and often known, since they tend to actively act and speak against the company and its management (but not always).

Individuals suffering from Presenteeism are a more common issue. I remember back in my college fraternity years that when we wanted to take a break during an active beer drinking game, we would announce, “I’m in, but I’m out,” effectively saying that we were still playing but that we were going to take a break for a bit.

The concept is actually getting a good bit of study from the academics. Wikipedia offers:

Scholars have provided various other descriptions of the concept. For instance, Simpson claimed that presenteeism is “the tendency to stay at work beyond the time needed for effective performance on the job.” Aronsson, Gustafsson, and Dallner wrote that it means attending work even when one feels unhealthy. In a recent review of the literature, Johns highlighted the lack of agreement between the many definitions. The author claimed that many of the definitions lack utility and that the term is most often defined as going to work while ill. He further noted that definitions of presenteeism, which are centered on attending work while sick, have received more evidence of construct validity. In other words, when defined as coming to work while sick, presenteeism seems to relate more to logical outcome variables and correlates.

I am going to expand the concept to refer to the employees who are, IN but OUT when it comes to their everyday active involvement in their workplace, to the large percentage of people who are not at either end of the engagement curve, the ones that are not actively engaged or dis-engaged. These people in the middle are the people that organizations should be focused on, the ones who can contribute a bit more to the results than they currently choose to do. They have the skills to perform, just not the motivation or peer support.

SO, how does one reduce Presenteeism in their organization? There is a LOT of research that says that the concept is pretty simple and straightforward and I will summarize it in four simple rules:

Ask them for their ideas
Ask them for their ideas
Ask them for their ideas
Ask them for their ideas

Visually and operationally, presenteeism reduction can look something like this:

Stop the everyday pushing and pulling of the wagon and let people sit down and play with ideas for a bit of time. They will often discover or share new ways of doing things that might make an impact on processes but will surely make an impact on engagement.

My simple rule of thumb is that the activity of management asking their people for ideas about improving their workplace, and then dealing honestly and openly with suggestions is the most straightforward way to deal with presenteeism. (This is not about doing some survey where everything in anonymous and results get buried but the active, face-to-face interface of supervisors and workers or managers and supervisors.)

If you feel that the boss cares for you, you are much more likely
to care for your work and the work of others.

If you would like to see a short video about how this can actually be accomplished, click on the 13-second video offered below. We are trying to keep this simple and easy in regards of how it can help motivate and engage people:

Your efforts to dis-un-engage people can be very straightforward – you can act to get them more involved and you can help them remove perceived roadblocks.

‘For a more detailed, operational overview of these ideas, take a look at this more elaborate, explanatory video below. Note that you can do that by exposing YOUR workplace wagon and asking people for ideas about what things might work better and what ideas and resources might already exist. Again, the research on this suggests that 2/3 of the people in workplaces feel their boss is not interested in their thinking, a prime causal factor of Presenteeism:

You can find our simple toolkit for decreasing workplace Performance Presenteeism by clicking on the image below:

My goal is to provide simple but effective tools for impacting people and performance, and I am not sure how I can be any more simple and straightforward. It is up to YOU to be more effective,

For the FUN of It!

 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® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Co.
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO Group

Stupidly Simple Thoughts on Employee Engagement

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On June 18, 2015

In Change Facilitation, dis-un-engagement, employee motivation, Facilitation, improve organizational performance, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator

It took me about two seconds to come up with the title for this post, after looking at a number of different posts around ideas for engagement and ideas for improving performance this morning. I put up a couple of things on my scoop.it page on Employee Engagement and I was completing a chapter for a book, so some thinking around the issue was fresh.

There is a lot of writing around what to do and how well things are working. Generally, the information provided by Gallup and Sirota and others suggests that little is actually improving. It begs the question, why not.

My belief is simple: there is not enough effective communications going on between the supervisor and the workers. There is not enough alignment to visions and goals and expectations, not enough or sufficient performance feedback (and I do not mean coaching here — see this analysis) and there is not nearly enough listening or asking questions by the management team.

So, why not?

• Is it task interference? Do the supervisors simply have too little time to devote to listening about issues and opportunities?

• Is it an actual lack of employee interest in what is going on in their workplace?

• Is it the reality of measurement, and that workers just do not have the scheduled time available to them to be in meetings with their boss?

• Is it somehow related to the overall training and development goals of the organization, in that these meetings should be produced and directed by the people in Training and Development or HR and that developmental and coaching discussions with people are not the role of the managers?

• Is it a disconnect between the manager and the supervisor when it comes to themes of productivity and employee retention and performance levels?

I am not really sure, but I do know that the opportunity for improvement absolutely exists and that it IS relatively easy to involve and engage people and get their ideas about workplace improvement and job performance skills and techniques. And I know that we can improve real teamwork and collaboration with this same approach.

Let me illustrate with two simple thoughts, expressed through my Square Wheels® theme and thinking:

and then there is this reality:

Is this really so HARD to accomplish? Aren’t you pretty sure that people have ideas for improvement and will share those ideas in a meeting and discussion? Sure, if the workplace has a poor history of engagement and innovation (“bad managers” abound, the research suggests), you should expect some initial venting of frustration. But most people DO have positive intentions and DO want to have a positive impact on things. They get intrinsic motivation from doing things successfully.

Implementing Round Wheels in a Square Wheels World is not all that difficult to accomplish.

If you don’t believe it, go ask somebody!

And if you are looking for a simple tool to better involve and engage, we just uploaded the new “Stupidly Simple Square Wheels Toolkit” on our website – $25 with instructions and tools.

For the FUN of It!

 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® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Co.
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO Group

Show and Tell and Ask for Engagement

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On April 17, 2015

In Change Facilitation, dis-un-engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Icebreakers, Involving and Engaging People

My partner, Joan, surprised me with an email she sent out to those people who are subscribed to our postings. I thought it was so good that I simply repost it here:

Remember “Show and Tell” Time
in Elementary School?
Use it now for Workplace Improvement!

Just as “Show and Tell” time mixed learning with fun back in your school days, you can use that same premise, today, to kick off a meeting that will engage people in creating workplace improvements. Here’s what you do:

Show an image, Tell what it represents and Ask for reactions and thoughts.

It’s that simple. Gather your group together and “Show” our Square Wheels One LEGO (above) image as you “Tell” them that “This is how most organizations really work.” Then, simply ASK them for their reactions and thoughts.

Asking for ideas is the leverage point for involvement and engagement so when you ask everyone to reflect on what you’ve just shared, you are setting up an opportunity that will generate open communications, creativity and a serious discussion of issues and ideas that can lead to improvements and promote employee engagement.

People respond, enthusiastically, to the Square Wheels concept as they appreciate this occasion to comfortably offer their own input into how things can work better.

The Square Wheels Lego Icebreaker Toolkit is only $19.95 and comes with everything you need to facilitate an engaging and productive session. You can choose to use either the LEGO Square Wheels image or the original Square Wheels One line-art illustration, as both are included, as well as a leader’s guide, worksheets for participants and Square Wheels posters to use in the workplace. Click on the image below to watch the video for an overview.

Use this “Show and Tell” scenario today as a unique and bombproof way to mix fun with important learning around new ideas and ways of doing things to impact organizational improvement and increased workplace happiness.

Useful tools that work in elegantly simple ways!

For the FUN of It!

 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!

 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!

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

Implementing Improvement – Ideas on Brainstorming

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On January 8, 2015

In business team building exercises, dis-un-engagement, employee motivation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, Managing and leading change, Team work

“Nobody ever washes a rental car!”

That is my anchor point for doing anything that involves organizational change and improvement. If one is to expect anything to happen, we must insure that there is buy-in and participation and engagement. But how do we actually generate a sense of ownership? Surely, it will not come when we tell people what to do — that only generates resistance (or compliance). It does not involve and engage them in any meaningful way even if they understand the reasons why those changes are being made.

One often hears that we need to “empower” the participants to actually go out and do something. Well, I strongly disagree with that possibly happening – how does one ever empower anyone to actually DO anything if they simply do not want to do it? Coercive measures are not an acceptable alternative in most situations.

(Note: We can generate behavior change by altering the mechanism by which people get feedback on their performance. That is a much better option than working with any kind of extrinsic reward system. Read more about that here and here.)

At the same time, many factors lead me to believe that there are a variety of opportunities for workplace improvement among individuals and among small groups, simply for the asking. There is a strong general motivation to make improvements if people feel the gap between what happens now and what could or should be happening. Cognitive Dissonance is but one framework that supports this framework of generating intrinsic motivation for improvement.

(You can also see a great animation of the concept of DRIVE, as framed by Dan Pink – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc )

But in the workplace in general, and especially in today’s risk-averse and “job enhanced” environments, the real key to rolling forward is not something like feedback or empowerment; I think Dis-Un-Empowerment is what needs to be addressed. We can involve and engage people and help them to identify issues and deal with the implementation of processes that help them manage roadblocks.

Generally, all of us make choices all through each day as to what we will do or not do. We will often choose NOT to do something because we perceive difficulties or perceived roadblocks (example: “He won’t support that idea because he did not support the last idea I had…”).

Most people can think of LOTS of things that would get in the way of implementing some idea or ideas for improvement (“It might be against policy.” “There probably won’t be any support / resources for that.”)

One key role of training (and management and coaching) is to act to REMOVE the perceived or potential roadblocks that are un-empowering to people acting individually or in groups. That can be accomplished by getting pre-ordained support from managers not in the workshop, having managers come into the training session to hear the ideas and manage the roadblocks (and have THEIR roadblocks managed – we know from lots of contacts that many managers and supervisors are more roadblocked than their people!) and for the trainer to have a very good background understanding of what can be done and how it can be accomplished.

One of the things we miss today are trainers with the extensive background in how to implement and then measure the effectiveness of the training in workplace improvement initiatives. There are many factors operating there including pressures of time and cost, which is one of the reasons that outside consultants can often get things accomplished when inside support people cannot — they also have the power of money and top management support behind them. But that is just a limitation and not a roadblock for the internal consultants.

Knowing how the most successful PAST improvements were implemented will give good insight into how the next FUTURE improvement might be implemented. There are cultural keys that offer perspective on these kinds of things.

So, how do we get the best results from brainstorming ideas?

Creating a gap between how things are now (Square Wheels thumping and bumping along) and how things could be operating (Round Wheels already exist) is a motivational force. And defining an implementation strategy for making small and continuous changes and improvements clarifies responsibilities often making change and improvement very doable.

But the real key is generating a feeling of ownership involvement. Too many people “rent” their time to an organization and go through the motions of maintaining their employment, rather than buying in to improve workplace improvement. The statistics on engagement and on “ready to leave for a new job elsewhere” are pretty discouraging when viewed from a position of leadership…

Yet most people do want to make a positive impact on the work they do and the workplace around them. They WANT things to be better, if we will let them do so. But they feel little ownership. According to a November 2011 analysis of its database of 5,700 employers representing 5 million employees, human resources consulting firm Aon Hewitt reported that engagement levels indicate the workforce is by and large indifferent to organizational success or failure.
(I address this in a more recent article on Presenteeism.)

Un-Engagement should concern all of us interested in productivity, people and performance.

You can read more about Dis-Un-Engagement by searching the blog. Another article is here. And here is an article on ownership.

What we CAN do is a better job of asking for ideas and generating possibilities for improvement from employees’ ideas. If they feel that they have a part in the issues and involvement in designing solutions, their involvement level will increase. Here are some suggestions and alternatives to simply doing what we do and generating the same results:

1 – Discuss the roadblocks that they feel are getting in the way of improving their performance. (You can find a number of articles of mine around different approaches here.)

2 – Ask them how to improve profitability. It is common that many people do not really consider costs and impacts on a daily basis and asking them to look at these issues might generate some good discussions about the purpose of their efforts in the overall organization.

3 – Discuss the impacts of other organizations on their ability to get things done. While this often tends toward the negative issues, there will also be some positive ones if you probe for them. Best practices of certain individuals in other departments will be seen and can be reinforced. Focusing on what is positive can help you build a better working relationship with other managers, for example, while you also look to address improvement issues.

4 – Get them to “Step Back” and look at their operations as if they were brand new employees and have them comment about what is not clear and what best practices might exist. Or, you can set this up as an accomplishment and chain backwards for things that were improved: “It is 2020 and our department was judged Best in the Business! What did we do that got us that recognition?” This approach tends to minimize roadblocks in their perceptions, since results were fait accompli.

Understand that it is impossible for a manager to have all the answers or to know all the issues. The workplace is really complicated and all sorts of things change on a regular basis. Plus, some people will construct better ways of doing things — Best Practices — that can be identified and shared throughout your workplace. Improvements can be generated by peer support for change.

And think about this:

If you are looking for simple and effective tools to generate involvement and engagement, click on the icon below:

For the FUN of It!

 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

The Art of Reframing and the Power of Positive Possibilities

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On October 21, 2014

In Business Haiku, Change Facilitation, dis-un-engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, manager as motivator, Team work

A few months ago, I crafted up a blog for Diane Crampton that I thought I should also publish here in my blog. I called it,

Recovering the Powers of Positive Possibilities – Ideas and Anchors for The Leadership Art of Reframing

Research shows that new hires rather quickly lose that initiative and spark and that they generally regress to the average morale of the group within a short period of time (Sirota Research, 2010). In other words, they had that motivation and they lost it because of how they were managed!

Recovery. Noun. 1) The act or process of returning to a normal condition, especially from sickness, a shock, or a setback; recuperation; 2) restoration to a former or better condition; 3) the regaining of something lost; 4) the extraction of something useful from materials or a situation which is otherwise useless or poor.

So, let’s talk about Recovery. If you step back from the wagon, you will see that this illustration both represents how things really work in most organizations and that it represents a whole big bunch of issues and opportunities.

Many Round Wheels are already in the wagon, so one key to identifying the issues is simple:

Don’t Just DO Something. Stand there!

In haiku, it might read something like this:

click on this image to open our poems and haiku blog

So, this is a blog around some ideas for dis-un-engaging people. The basic idea is pretty simple:

“Potential Possibility for Performance Productivity Practices Already Exist, and Square Wheels are everywhere!
Find them, Engage People, and Fix Things!

But don’t find the wheels yourself! Find the wagon pushers and have them find the wheels, identify the possibilities and implement their own solutions. The rationale is quite simple:

People resist the changes done TO them but develop ownership involvement for their own ideas about making things better.
Nobody ever washes a rental car.

People need to be engaged and the role of manager is to help remove all those things that have been disengaging them in their work. If they have some ownership of the solutions and they see possibilities for improvement, they will put forth more effort to succeed. As the two next illustrations might show, it is about motivation and active involvement:

But the reality is that the manager is an unknown factor in all this in most workplaces. Surveys show that people often feel their ideas are ignored or that they are under aversive control. They will show a lot of compliance behavior, not what we want for involvement and engagement. There is often an issue of trust. And, “Trust is the residue of promises fulfilled.” (Frank Navran)

The suggestion is that managers do a better job of simply asking for ideas for improvement and productivity and that they do a better job of listening and empowering people to actually implement those ideas. What we suggest is that you take the ideas about what is not working smoothly and reframe them into possibilities that can be implemented.

If people point to something as a Square Wheel, people will naturally generate a round wheel alternative based on their cognitive dissonance. The real question is one of motivation, reflected as, “Why bother; no one cares…”

Managers need to be identified as coaches and mentors, in addition to their other roles. They need to act as if they care about improvement and about people. Managers should be looking ahead, identifying possibilities and future outcomes, and involving and engaging their staffs for the long pull ahead.

Below should be part one of your thinking about people and performance. The focus is on the front end of the process of generating higher levels of involvement and building strengths. Doing some training and some team building will allow people to develop their own ideas and potential as well as improve workplace results. We have one of the truly best team building simulations focused on alignment and performance. Click on the image below to see The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine.

If we continue to do the same thing, we can pretty much expect the same results.

The key is to Involve. Engage. Enlist. Align. Expect. Impact.

And generate more fun and involvement out there among the people who we depend on to get things done,

For the FUN of It!

 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

KISS – Keeping It Stupidly Simple – A Square Wheels Poster on Team Perspective

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On June 2, 2014

In Articles on Teamwork, Change, dis-un-engagement, employee motivation, innovation, intrinsic motivation, Team work

Conversations keep reinforcing the idea that everything is getting increasingly complicated these days. We have the paradox of training programs and assessments and similar tools being more and more complex and nuanced while, at the same time, none of us have much time to learn anything new. Where we used to be able to find three days for an off-site training program to learn and practice new skills, these kinds of development activities are now done online in 2 hours.

As I capture with some data and supporting materials in a blog linked to the icon below, managers are most definitely working increasing hours because of our continuous electronic connection to the workplace. Realize that almost half of us check email going to bed or at the dinner table.

So, it is my intention to put up a number of posts and illustrations and posters reinforcing the theme that we need to start looking for some SIMPLE solutions instead of increasing the increasingly complexity. So here is a simple idea on the need to STOP working and take a simple look around to see if any new ideas or improvements might exist.

If you want to see some ideas and access some bombproof simple tools for improving intrinsic motivation and involving and engaging people in the workplace, clicking here will share some of my posts on the stupidly simple theme of Dis-Un-Engagement:

At Performance Management Company, we continue to sell simple tools and recommending simple approaches to generating involvement and motivation for continuous improvement in the workplace.

For the FUN of It!

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

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s blog on Poems and Quips on Workplace Improvement is here.

Square Wheels are a trademark of Performance Management Company

LEGO® is a trademark of the The LEGO Group

The Actual Impossibility of Engagement – An Organizational Reality

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On May 8, 2014

In Change Facilitation, dis-un-engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, manager as motivator, people and performance, team motivation

Check me on this if you can, but we keep talking about improving workplace performance by the active involvement and engagement of people doing their jobs. There are lots of reasons as well as lots of data that support this as a REALLY good idea because of the widespread impacts on results.

Just back from ASTD and after conversations with colleagues, both there as well as in a variety of email connections, it seems that this engagement idea is a non-starter and doomed for failure in so many organizations. In a simple illustration, let me anchor down my thoughts:

Does anyone really think that HR is going to be able to do some kind of training event or lead some kind of organizational improvement initiative to involve and engage all the workers? Maybe, and I can think of a couple of organizations that have the culture to pull that off. But the day-to-day reality of the supervisory environment would suggest that improvement generated by active involvement and participation is a high-risk activity for most supervisors in most organizations.

After all, are they not already busy right now? Are they not up to their eyeballs in tasks and reports and meetings and reports and tasks? Do we simply expect that they would be motivated to do some “public speaking” and set up meetings where they involve people to share ideas about workplace issues and problems (and then expect some resolution and improvement) or is it a lot safer just to continue to do things the same way.

What is the Reality of this (from their perspective)?

Lee Ellis popped up a nice blog post here that I summarize:

Three strong indicators of an unhealthy organization are:

• A lack of trust leading to poor teamwork and alignment.
• A lack of clarity about mission, vision, and values.
• A fear of conflict. People are not allowed to say what they really think.

A healthy organization, alternatively, has management who:

1. Build Trust
2. Clarify and Over-Communicate
3. Create a Safe Environment and Encourage Debate
4. Are Courageous

All this stuff is fine, well and good, but anecdotal conversations continue to support the very basic idea that supervisors are incredibly busy with what is already expected of them (they do not even take all their earned vacation days, it seems and they work while they are off the job with emails and calls, etc.).

So, can we really expect them to add the risky activity of asking about the problems that their people feel exist and be expected to implement some solutions? Sure, they could implement teamwork, but that is a whole different set of worms…

Do most of them really want to start up performance improvement teams and use up even more of their time and the time of their people? And, a lot of supervisors are fearful of teams because of the potential loss of control that they perceive might occur. Plus, they often need the support of their managers and maybe even HR.

So, is engagement of people for workplace improvement even a reality for most organizations doing things the same way and expecting things to change and improve?

I think that there are good possibilities for change and improvement and we sell some very simple tools to generate ideas in a pretty safe and effective manner with our Square Wheels toolkits. This one on basic facilitation is cheap and easily used.

An organizational motivational reality might look like this:

Square Wheels One poem Always Do Pretty Rotten

And thus, my basic suggestion is pretty simple:

Make things happen. Your choice.

For the FUN of It!

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

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s blog on Poems and Quips on Workplace Improvement is here.

We also sell a powerful team building simulation, The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine. You can view a slideshare overview of the exercise here:

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

Category: dis-un-engagement Page 1 of 5

Play the Fool, Achieve Hero Leadership

Dr. Seuss on Disruptive Engagement

The Hubcap Report – a note on Task Interference and Supervisors

Radical Candor and Disruptive Engagement

If not you, WHO? If not now, WHEN?

Spring Forward Monday™ is March 13, 2017 – A Square Wheels® Solution

Presenteeism – They are IN but they are OUT

Stupidly Simple Thoughts on Employee Engagement

Show and Tell and Ask for Engagement

Remember “Show and Tell” Time
in Elementary School?
Use it now for Workplace Improvement!

Engagement – The Day AFTER National Employee Appreciation Day

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

Implementing Improvement – Ideas on Brainstorming

“Nobody ever washes a rental car!”

The Art of Reframing and the Power of Positive Possibilities

Recovering the Powers of Positive Possibilities – Ideas and Anchors for The Leadership Art of Reframing

KISS – Keeping It Stupidly Simple – A Square Wheels Poster on Team Perspective

The Actual Impossibility of Engagement – An Organizational Reality

Category: dis-un-engagement Page 1 of 5

Remember “Show and Tell” Time in Elementary School? Use it now for Workplace Improvement!

“Nobody ever washes a rental car!”

Recovering the Powers of Positive Possibilities – Ideas and Anchors for The Leadership Art of Reframing

Remember “Show and Tell” Time
in Elementary School?
Use it now for Workplace Improvement!