Category: employee engagement Page 1 of 3

A trip to the library should be enlightening, and I read a lot of books so I go at least twice a month. I usually have my card and the transaction process for checkout works fine. That is unless you bang up into a dis-engaged person running a rigid transaction processing system that is NOT customer oriented.

I had a book on reserve that had a pickup deadline and I was returning that day from a camping trip, pretty scruffy as well as somewhat disorganized, but certainly relaxed. Then I made the mistake in thinking that just because I was a regular customer to this small branch, the transactions could be accomplished without my library card.

I thus went into the library with:

a book checked out in my name (it was a science book – who reads those?)
a book reserved on the shelf with my name
no wallet, it being temporarily lost among all my camping gear that was on the floor of the garage, so no picture ID or library card.

So, could we simply do this transaction? Nope. I was required to have a picture ID. They said that someone could have stolen the book I was returning to pretend they were me so that they could steal a book that no one would know that I had reserved. (That somehow made sense to them and I guess there must be a big black market in stolen library books by friends of people who get books from the local library that I am unaware of.)

They also call this their Privacy Policy, as if there was some aspect of my personal privacy that they were protecting.

And when I asked them to comment about the policy, one that focuses only processing and handling transactions and not on helping customers, one of them said that they like it as it is and that, “It makes sense to us.”

(The library management, BTW, drives the policy and the supervisor was no more helpful than the clerk. Even showing her a picture of my mother’s driving license (Mom is 98 and does not drive, but her ID is valid) and with the same last name was not sufficient to indicate my probable personal identity, nor was the fact that my phone list shows “OWNER – Scott Simmerman” as the first entry in the numbers and it requires my thumbprint to even open the phone!)

“It makes sense to us!'”

Really? Does that process make sense to customers? I mean, what is my exposure here from a privacy standpoint? The Federal Government set up a commission that is demanding the states release voter names and social security numbers and addresses and voting affiliations and voting history to supposedly prevent future in-person voter fraud (which exists in a tiny percentage) but my LIBRARIAN is going to protect by privacy by not lending out a reserved book in my name without a picture ID?

How would any potential thief even know that the requested book was in my name on the shelf? And some internal thief could certainly just take the book and walk out if the marketplace was that lucrative for stolen library books, right?

Solution:

A simple solution is that the leadership of the library would be to get the clerks to improve their service by calling the customers by name.

I see the person that cuts my hair a lot less than my library visits and THEY always call me by name… That is a fairly common thing and positive thing for organizations with a small customer base and repeat customers.

The team should realize that some reasonable security is important, but that some judgement can also apply. I just put a picture of my drivers’ license on my phone (there was one on there but with 30,000 images, I simply could not find it quickly). And, I am asking each clerk to repeat back my account number when I check out a book. I am thinking of testing the system again without a proper ID…

The leadership should allow their people to act with judgement and sort through the situation logically and allow intelligent and reasonable deviations from their policies, procedures, rules and regulations. They could have asked me for some history of what I had borrowed in the past, or my address or phone. But they made NO attempt to think through how I might be verified. They simply said NO.

The library is not the DMV, where people might be trying to get fake IDs. It is The Library! They have books and tapes, not jewelry or gold coins. Nobody is trying to really steal from them, are they?

The leadership could CHOOSE to do things differently and the management could dis-un-empower the clerks to deal with their taxpaying customers in a bit more friendly way.They should not have stupid, inflexible systems that frustrate their taxpaying customers or their employees.

I am also publishing a short letter on this in the local newspaper, since I cannot be the only person this has happened to and we DO pay for their books, building and salaries, right?

I also came back to this and redid the graphic just a little. They really DO need to have some Disruptive Engagement and arrive at a better customer service quality standard. Processing and handling transactions is NOT service quality, meeting expectations actually defines it. Managers need to have policies that empower people to make good decisions, not simply defend a bad policy!

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

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

FREE The Supervisor – thoughts on Disruptive Positive Active Engagement

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On June 15, 2017

In Change Facilitation, Disruptive Engagement, employee engagement, employee motivation, Facilitation, improve organizational performance, intrinsic motivation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, productivity improvement

Free The Supervisor might be my new chant as I continue to research and discuss and consider the reality of most workplaces. In a simple phrase, “They Get Pressed.”

Remember – The ONLY people who actually produce any income for an organization are the workers. All of the management function as overhead costs. And who actually manages the workers?

Here is a defined, analyzed, job and task description of the job of Supervisor, from the ReferenceForBusiness.com website (abridged because it was WAY too long and detailed):

The Role of The Supervisor:

Supervisors play an important role in the business environment. Their primary job is to see that the work performed by employees is completed on time and at the highest level of quality. In order to complete this task, they must know the production process and have an understanding of human behavior. Theirs is a pressure-filled job.

It is their job to write reports, letters, memos, performance appraisals, and the gamut of documents that businesses need to operate. They must be equally comfortable in communicating with chief executive officers and assemblyline production workers. They must be able to run effective meetings. They must carefully monitor the organization’s goals, strategies, tactics, and production schedules. They must be cognizant of union rules where applicable. They must be trainers, confidants, computer experts, goal setters—in short, supervisors must be well-rounded employees who are willing to accept the responsibilities required to keep a company running.

Job duties include

Supervisor as Communicator.
Supervisor as Trainer.
Supervisor as Student.
Supervisor as Goal Setter.
Supervisor as Evaluator.
Supervisor as Human Resources Specialist.
Supervisor as Computer Expert.
Supervisor as Producer.
Supervisor as Adviser.
Supervisor as Idea Champion.
Supervisor as Environmental Watchdog.
Supervisor as International Manager.

But, as I shared in other articles and blogs, and despite corporations spending billions of dollars in survey fees and executive and management time focused on improving active involvement and motivating the workers to improve productivity and performance, the Supervisors still do not apparently get it, since results do not improve. Let’s blame them for the performance problems, right?

No! Let’s look at task interference, our measurement and expectation systems, what we give feedback about from the management team (if asked about engagement once every few months, you can expect a focus on engagement every few months…).

I keep hearing about EMPOWERMENT as a driver of engagement, yet a simple observation will show that most people in most organizations are un-empowered. So, who will do the DIS-un-empowerment and focus on the removal of perceived and actual roadblocks other than The Supervisor? (Certainly not HR!)

SO.

Why not try to make the Supervisors a bit less constrained and a lot more able to do what they want to do in regards to actively involving their people, building teams, solving workplace improvement issues and things like that?
Why not look to FREE them up from some of those duties listed above. Let’s do away with performance appraisals (by any name) and let’s reduce the clerical burden.
Let’s free them up from all the administrative minuscule and even give them some training. Let’s give them more skills and more confidence to use those skills through support from their managers.
Let’s make them more like Facilitators than Bosses (since BOSS spelled-backwards is self-explanatory).

There is no one simple way to do this; there are lots of ways to do this but we have to make the choice to make things happen. Look, the very brave supervisors already do this now, and you know who they are. They are the ones with the exemplary results. I mean, how else can you explain those results?

Taking a quote from Conant, “Behold the Supervisor who, like the turtle, only makes progress when he sticks his neck out.

Let’s get the supervisors and their people to break the things that are already broken and get more motivated because they can fix things and make 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

Disruptive Engagement, Supervisors, Empowerment and Performance Improvement

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On June 9, 2017

In Articles on Teamwork, Change Facilitation, dis-un-empowerment, employee engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, experiential learning, Facilitation, innovation, intrinsic motivation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, Metaphors for business improvement

I listened to a great presentation yesterday by Mercer on managing engagement, the need to focus on key metrics but the reality of driving behavior at the very bottom of the organization, which is what engagement is. Nicely presented, with great graphics. And I look forward to getting a copy of the information, statistics and related materials.

On the other hand, it seemed to have nothing actionable. It focused on senior managers and HR and organizational statistics and surveys and never once directly mentioned the Supervisors, to my recollection, as being involved in this “involvement and empowerment and engagement stuff.”

It is totally clear that workers and supervisors and managers are basically un-involved and un-engaged in so many workplaces. And it is management effectiveness AND the workplace environment that is behind this problem. It is NOT a “senior management leadership issue” that can be corrected with more surveys and more executive development.

To illustrate:

Gallup:

only ONE IN FOUR employees “strongly agree” that their supervisor provides meaningful feedback to them, that the feedback they receive helps them do better work.
Only 21% of employees strongly agree that their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work.

DDI reported

87% of first-time supervisors feel frustrated, anxious and uncertain about their new role
Only 11% said they were groomed for that role through some developmental training or program.

Rick Bell shared some statistics in the March issue of Workforce magazine about how badly workers are being supervised

35% of US workers would forgo a raise to see their boss fired
44% of employees say they have been emotionally or physically abused by a supervisor
3 of 4 workers say that their boss is the worst / most stressful part of the job

Again:

It is NOT a “senior management leadership issue” that can be
corrected with more surveys and more executive development.

The issue here is basic supervision, basic leadership at the front lines. People are uninvolved and frustrated, so the solutions are about Dis-un-engagement and Dis-un-empowerment. *

The solution requires involving workers in workplace improvement for both process improvement and more self-determination and personal growth. It is about demonstrating that the supervisor is actively listening and helping to implement ideas. It is about the workers and the management team removing roadblocks that are perceived to be operating that are blocking engagement and the ability to act empowered. Simply, it is about facilitation and feedback.

*Note – I do not believe that it is possible to directly engage or empower someone else. You cannot change their internal workings, directly. What you can do is address their perceived issues and determine what they think blocks their acting in a more involved manner. Roadblock removal is kind of like coaching, only it can be done in a group or team setting. It is accomplished by ASKING FOR THEIR PERCEPTIONS ABOUT HOW THINGS WORK and what they might try to do differently. Remember that “Nobody ever washes a rental car,” and that “Trust is the residue of promises fulfilled.”

The Square Wheels Project is a simple online training program focused on using the metaphor of Square Wheels^® as a tool for communicating about issues and opportunities, and it is accomplished by teaching the supervisor basic facilitation skills and providing a simple and bombproof tool for leading discussions. It also supports these supervisors with peer-level communications about issues and questions and dealing with problems and politics.

The Solutions:

We do not share any silver bullets about how to fix these problems. You can see some additional thoughts around implementation in this other blog post. Every organization has its own blend of communications and cultural issues. But the removal of perceived roadblocks to implementing ideas for performance improvement is intrinsically motivation and a way to address common fears around implementing change. (See Dan Stones article about overcoming team fears here)

But, operationally, it looks something like this: Let people play with Round Wheels since they are currently operating on Square ones…

So, without cost or training or doing anything but downloading two pdf files, go play with this idea. Below is the really simple explanation of how it works.

Print out the two card-based worksheets. (SWs One 2017 What Might Be Cards to Print and SWs One 2017 How Does Cards to Print)

Cut each of the pages above into 10 relatively similar-sized “business cards.”

1 – Give a “how does this represent how things really work” card (left) to each person in your meeting and have them discuss the image in small groups. Let them consider possibilities. Ask them to share their thoughts.

2 – After discussion, give one “what might be some of our Square Wheels” card to each person and then ask them for some of their thoughts.

3 – Process the ideas as you wish. Do not defend the status quo but consider these thoughts and ideas as possibilities. “What else?” is a good response.

If you like what you see, which might start out with some discussion about the problems of processes and leadership and teamwork and ideas in a general workplace situation and the transition into what some of the issues might be in your workplace, you will get some idea of the power of this metaphor for changing thinking, language and goal-directed performance improvement.

We have a variety of workplace improvement tools available for purchase, all framed around the idea of changing people’s perceptions and behavior, driving improved teamwork and communications, and generally working to disrupt the way things are and create a more positive workplace.

For the FUN of It!

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

Scott’s blog on themes of People and Performance is here.

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

The Performance Management Company blog is found at www.PerformanceManagementCompanyBlog.com

The Square Wheels Project is found on Udemy, and you can access this online supervisory facilitation skills training program, complete with downloadable powerpoint slides, printed handouts and other support materials at www.TheSquareWheelsProject.com

Dr. Scott Simmerman holds a doctorate degree in behavioral neurophysiology from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is a Certified Training Professional through the IAPPD and a Certified Professional Facilitator by the International Association of Facilitators. His LinkedIn bio is extensive and found at http://www.linkedin.com/in/scottsimmerman

Trust in the Sand

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 15, 2017

In Change Facilitation, employee engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, experiential learning, Facilitation, improve organizational performance, intrinsic motivation, Involving and Engaging People, Leadership Development Game, manager as motivator, Metaphors for business improvement, motivational team building exercises, ownership involvement, Team Building Games, Trust Building

My colleagues in Romania just sent me an email about one of their blog posts on leadership that had this image within it:

I thought it was pretty neat, and it reminded me of my friend and colleague Frank Navran’s quote that:

“Trust is the residue of promises fulfilled”

and how easy it is to simply wipe it away with some foolish behavior…

All it takes is a gust of wind to change things and we need to be reminded that trust is something we need to maintain, not just do once in a while.

Now Vio’s blog is written in Romanian, and even with translation services, I am not going to spend much time going through his key comments around the elements of trust; I simply reacted to his email and sent him the following:

“Trust is not just about writing in the sand. It is also about having perspective, moving about to see what is really happening around you and being willing to move about to potentially see things from other positions rather than from where you are standing. It is also about involving people with shared goals and acting collectively. I think it can also look like this:”

We should also be reminded and mindful about the diversity of people within our organizations and about the reality that all of us know more than any of us when it comes to generating ideas and engagement for improving workplace performance.

Here at Performance Management Company, we sell simple tools for impacting teamwork (Vio at HumanInvest has our Lost Dutchman game in English and Romanian) as well as impacting innovation and motivation. We suggest that leaders work to actively involve their people in generating ideas for improvement and facilitating creative problem solving as well as generating alignment and collaboration.

We also have a simple online facilitation skills training course and toolkit (really cheap and highly effective!) at The Square Wheels Project.

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

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

Save

Are Managers simply BAD or is it the Workplace

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 21, 2016

In Change Facilitation, employee engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, innovation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, people and performance, productivity improvement, workplace performance improvement

This will be a short post, with a link to a solid article and one illustration.

Gallup had an article that is depressing: www.gallup.com/businessjournal/200108/damage-inflicted-poor-managers.aspx

It is about the DAMAGE caused by bad managers. It is a short but hard read, saying in part:

Managers who don’t know how to meet the engagement needs of their team become a barrier to employee, team and company performance.

And a disturbingly high percentage of managers around the world are not meeting the needs of their employees. Actively disengaged employees (24%) outnumber engaged employees (13%) by nearly 2-to-1, according to Gallup — implying that at the global level, work is more often a source of frustration than fulfillment.

If work looks like this, which it seems to, can’t we actually DO SOMETHING to change the rope? Can’t we make things more involving and engaging by simply asking people for their ideas for improvement?

That is what we are trying to teach with The Square Wheels Project: a simple facilitation process to allow supervisors to ask for ideas for improvement.

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

Square Wheels, Dr. Seuss and “suck” or “muck?”

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On November 28, 2016

In Business Haiku, employee engagement, employee motivation, Facilitation, improve organizational performance, innovation, team motivation

As we develop more and more thoughts on The Square Wheels Project, our course to teach facilitation and engagement skills to supervisors using an online LMS and our Square Wheels^® tools, I will occasionally digress and do something like a Dr. Seuss poem around one of the images.

With this particular one, though, I could not decide on the best wording so I ask my team and of course, I got two different answers so I did up a third one to confuse things even more…

Let me know which of these you like best. Maybe Dan or Chris can set up a poll; that is beyond my pay grade, I think!

Anyway, here are one, two and three:

So, if you have a most liked, let me know.

The Square Wheels Project continues to roll along,

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

BOSS: Spelled Backwards

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On May 31, 2016

In business team building exercises, Continuous continuous improvement, employee engagement, employee motivation, empowerment, Engagement, Facilitation, improve organizational performance, innovation, intrinsic motivation, manager as motivator, Organizational Development Tools, people and performance

Boss. In organizations, a lot of people know precisely who that is. And that can be a positive or a negative, as I will try to explain.

My dad owned a small trucking company in South Jersey for nearly 50 years and he was the boss, for sure. He made all the decisions, ran the office, did the collection, gave his customers bottles of hooch every Christmas and ran the company as a one-man band. He had a half-dozen trucks and he did well enough to buy a summer house that gave our family a place to be at the beach, boats and cars and all that. From that perspective, my dad was a good boss.

On the other hand, there is an aspect of BOSS that is not so good. You would sometimes see it in how he might interact with a driver. Orin was always stopping in on prospects to generate new business and my dad generally never wanted to talk with him, telling me to tell Orin he was not around, for example. Or if there was a problem, the conversation tended to be one-sided. My dad did not generally appreciate the thoughts and ideas of the guys who worked with him.

“I’m the boss, here” generally infers complete control and a bit more yelling and telling than asking and listening. Boss translates to Ruler, the Decider, someone who has all the bucks and they stop right there. I see the word “autocratic” in the management haze, the imperial-ness of the boss as a person.

I see The Boss theme happening in an organization where 60% of the employees feels that no one listens to their ideas or respects them for their work or personal accomplishments.
I see The Boss theme in organizations where 10% or less of the employees see themselves as actively engaged but the vast majority rating themselves as un-involved or even “Actively Dis-Engaged” and choosing not to be involved and engaged, with the correlated high levels of absenteeism and turnover. And even some sabotage (see this post of mine).
And, I see The Boss as someone who simply knows that they have the right ideas and approach and that they could not possibly benefit from any training on listening skills or engagement or innovation facilitation.

In those cases, BOSS spelled backwards probably is a pretty good explanation of their overall attitude and approach to employee involvement and engagement.

John was one such animal. He was The Boss, president of a company that asked me to help improve their customer service. We did some initial work and then had one of their first ever Manager’s Meetings, an all hands deal at a golf resort where we had scheduled some work sessions around some golf. You might have guessed that John was a Big Time Golfer, which is why a golf course was selected for a business meeting, and why meetings were actually scheduled around his tee times.

And, in that meeting, John actually said, while sitting there going through his mail (I was so shocked that I wrote it down!) as we were talking about employee ideas for improving the organization,

“That’s like asking the vegetables
how to design a refrigerator.”

John obviously saw himself as, The Boss.

And my one-liner back is,

“Boss spelled backwards is self-explanatory.”

John was not there the following year, since his charter by the board of directors to improve operations and customer retention was not going that well regardless of what we tried to do at the lower levels.

A Customer Service Fundamental:

It’s hard to care for customers
if you don’t feel the boss cares for you.

Perceptions are important, and if workers don’t feel right about the company, it is hard to get them to do those things that exceed customer expectations. It is hard to get them to feel motivated to perform at moderate to high levels. Sure, the top performers perform, but they always do that for intrinsic reasons until they burn out and leave. Note that average employees are often involved in Presenteeism. the situation where they show up and accomplish the minimally accepted level of work and performance competence.

Aldo note that the poor performers are actively un-involved and sometimes intentionally sabotaging the work. Why not choose to do some things differently to get a result that is #morebetterfaster?

So, you might simply reflect on the simple themes in, “Hey Boss!” Asking for and listening to ideas from your people does not involve a lot of training or skills, just the positive intention to treat them effectively.

It can look something like this:

Any questions? Just ask me, because I am The Boss!

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

Innovation and Change: BIG Sale on Square Wheels!

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On May 20, 2016

In Change Facilitation, employee engagement, implementation, innovation, Innovation Implementation, intrinsic motivation, Metaphors for business improvement, productivity improvement, workplace performance improvement

A conversation turns into an idea and then an illustration is produced. That seems how creativity and innovation flow around here. A comment about buggy whips and top hats becomes an image about change and survival. Take a look at this simple illustration, but do take a moment to actually consider the realities.

DO take a moment and consider what is happening…

The two stores on the left are closed because the business simply disappeared. Somewhere, someone is making buggy whips because there are still a few horse and buggy wagons rolling around. Heck, one company makes LED whips for your off-road vehicle so it can be seen in the dark! Another “buggy whip store” sells men’s clothing in Nebraska and they do not even have a website but only a FaceBook page. So it looks like that business buggy whip business has kind of disappeared…

Scan to the right and you will see The Big Sale going on at Harry’s Square Wheels Wagonry Store. Harry has been in business for a long time, has a great inventory of new wheels in a variety of colors. He can probably even order you chrome ones!

But note that his former employee, Susan, has opened up a new store, one selling tires. Susan and her partner Sally have limited inventory and small volume at this point. Susan and Sally got the idea one day when at work, and they decided to act on their idea and make these things more available. (Yeah, Harry has met Sally, finally.)

It was actually a big moment for the ladies, and they thought that they could capitalize on that idea and make round tires into a business. Personally, I have to wish them a LOT of success, because the idea is great, but having the ability and resources to implement the idea is what is important. Asking questions and generating involvement is a key success strategy for implementation.

We offer The Stupidly Simple Square Wheels Facilitation Toolkit for a meager $25 and we are nearly ready to launch our LMS MOOC to share some ideas and frameworks for how to use these simple illustrations and this direct approach to involve and engage people for workplace improvement.

Click here to read about Presenteeism, the reality that about 50% of most workers in most workplaces are “In, but Out” when it comes to their active involvement or the thinking that their boss listens to their ideas. It has been a workplace statistical constant since I started in the people and performance business in 1978.

The ONLY way to address the issues of un-engagement of the majority of a workforce is to involve and engage the Supervisors in the involvement and engagement process of their people to align to organizational visions and values and to focus them on improving their own workplace. I have never seen even a single workplace where people did not have good ideas for improvement.

It is NOT within an HR capability to fix this, nor one of Training and Development. It cannot be addressed with a survey or a videotape of the CEO talking about these things. LOTS of things can be done, but the rubber meets the road where the supervisor sits with the people.

It is a simple concept of providing them with bombproof tools and asking them to ask for ideas. Why not?

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 themes of People and Performance is here.

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

How many people have seen Square Wheels illustrations?

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On May 6, 2016

In Change Facilitation, employee engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, improve organizational performance, intrinsic motivation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, Organizational Development Tools, people and performance

Got a problem with motivation, engagement or productivity and looking for a simple and bombproof, proven tool? Take a minute and read this. And Think!

A team of us are working at building our online teaching resource wrapped around the idea of “stupidly simple facilitation” through the use of my Square Wheels® theme. The project has gone through a number of phases and Dan Stones in Melbourne has jumped in to help us drive all of this forward. Expect some fun stuff as we continue to rock and roll.

As we were chatting, Dan asked me the simple question,

“How many people have seen or used Square Wheels?”

That is a really good question, for which I have no clue. History shows I have been presenting the theme at conferences and workshops since 1993 when I started using the main cartoon, Square Wheels One, done in black ink by my friend Roy Sabean. A few presentations later and I had 4 and then 7 different illustrations. When I got to 13, people started asking me for copies to use and I started selling a set in a brown envelope as colored transparencies and black line art.

Then, they wanted me to explain how to use them. Really? “Just do what I do or do your own thing,” I said, to no avail. They wanted me to write that stuff down, which resulted in a book with photocopiable masters. That was back in 1993, with the first book published in 1994.

By 2004, we were in our fifth edition of The Big Book, a package containing descriptions for using more than 200 of the illustrations and for making transparencies. I am guessing that I still have a 3 or 4 foot stack of transparency versions of these materials in different places in the house!

So, I did not have an answer for Dan. Since 1993, I have presented workshops in 38 countries and dozens of conferences, including more than 10 trips each to places like Singapore and Hong Kong. And we have sold a lot of a variety of books and electronic toolkits since we started all this more than 20 years ago. My squarewheels.com website went up in 1998!

But I just saw a statistic that is relevant, one that I blogged on in a different place. There, I said:

For what is probably my 40th year of viewing this same statistical reality, here we go again: Leadership Management Australasia’s LMA survey summary, April 2016 shared this stunning commentary:

Communication and connection are the cornerstone of relationships – a quarter to a third of employees believe their managers seldom or never listen to them, understand their issues, seek their input and ideas, or help them to resolve the issues and challenges they face.

Okay. So one thing I am pretty sure of.So, here is my tongue-in-cheek but serious answer to Dan’s original question:

Two-thirds of the employees worldwide have NOT had their manager use the Square Wheels theme in a discussion about improving their workplace involvement and performance.

If they did, things would probably be different. Square Wheels really are everywhere and the round ones are already in the wagon. Communications would have HAD to improve!

There ARE some things you can choose to do now:

We believe that managers should be motivators, and that engagement comes directly from active involvement and communications about issues and opportunities, about goals and expectations. It is about teamwork and shared perspectives as well as about ideas for improvement/ We think “this engagement and motivation stuff” is pretty straightforward and that people are intrinsically motivated when they feel a sense of ownership involvement.

A solution? Consider using our $25 Stupidly Simple Toolkit to generate a conversation in your workplace. Or wait until we get our online MOOC up and running where we can teach and support you in your improvement initiative. The choice is yours and we will guarantee it will work for you to help involve and engage your people, improving communications in many ways,

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

“Spring Forward Monday” For Workplace Improvement

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On February 29, 2016

In employee engagement, Facilitation, improve organizational performance, people and performance, productivity improvement, Spring Forward Monday, Square Wheels LEGO images

Monday’s, most typically, are the least favorite day of the work week but the Monday following the Daylight Saving’s “spring forward” time change, arguably, should be considered the worst of Mondays being that people find it even more challenging to face this workday since they are still adjusting to having lost an hour from their lives the day before. According to numerous studies, the attitudes and happenings around this lost hour cause this Monday to be particularly low in workplace productivity.

What might you be doing to counteract the loss of productivity that will most likely occur in your workplace on Monday, March 14, 2016?

At Performance Management Company, we’re always looking for opportunities that can bring about employee engagement and workplace improvement for better organizational success. Realizing that Monday, March 14th is that special kind of day that needs a good reason for getting up and going to work, we’ve got a concept and solution for turning it into a rewarding workplace happening day and we’re calling it,

Spring Forward Monday!

What is the Spring Forward Monday Concept?

Managers and leaders can gather their employees together and seize Monday, March 14, 2016, as day for workplace improvement by inviting ideas, innovation and involvement for improving workplace practices. By doing so, people can get away from their desks and become energized by taking part in a process that can make a positive difference for everyone.

How Can You Do This?

It’s simple. Facilitate a session that will stimulate and engage employees in sharing their perspectives and ideas for making a better workplace. Doing so will give them a feeling of empowerment and an opportunity to create improvements and increased workplace happiness.

If you’d like a way to successfully approach this, we designed The Stupidly Simple Square Wheels Facilitation Toolkit for just this type of occasion with everything needed to create an interactive and engaging session with serious outcomes. The gist of this Toolkit is the Square Wheels One illustration that elegantly generates thinking, creativity and humor as people react to it and its lead-in statement, “This is how most organizations really work.”

Here’s a quick, illustrated video showcasing

how facilitating

Spring Forward Monday

in your workplace will cause people to

“Wake up and Energize for Improvements.”

You can purchase this Toolkit here for only $24.95, for a one-time cost with unlimited use with any number of people.

This Toolkit provides both the original black and white line-art Square Wheels One illustration and the new Lego image of Square Wheels One

giving you the choice of using either version.

Square Wheels One - copyright 1993, Performance Management Company

Square Wheels image using LEGO by Scott Simmerman

Here’s what’s included in Toolkit:

The Square Wheels One illustration (in both the original line-art and its Lego image)
A Leader’s Guide for facilitating the session
Participant Worksheets/Handouts
A collection of Square Wheels Lego Posters that can be hung in the workplace as anchors to the insights gained.

All yours for only $24.95!

Whether you choose to use this Toolkit or prefer to consider another way to approach the Spring Forward Monday concept, it surely makes sense to make a difference in everyone’s present and future workdays through involving them and energizing them in the journey forward.

Make Monday, March 14, 2016 your
Spring Forward Monday!

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 themes of People and Performance is here.

Nobody Ever Washes a Rental Car – Ownership and Herding Cats

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On June 2, 2015

In Articles on Teamwork, Change Facilitation, employee engagement, employee motivation, improve organizational performance, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator

“Nobody ever washes a rental car“ is a phrase I have been using in workshops and in my writings since the mid-80s to describe the basic issues around ownership involvement and engagement. The basic concept is simple: people do not take care of things very well unless they have a feeling of ownership about them.

The reason I bring this up is funny, in a way. I had written a chapter for a to-be-published book and the editor makes the change giving the attribution of this quote to someone who published an article in 2002. That was a bit insulting, actually, that she made the change without asking me. Just Do It is not always a good strategy when making changes to someone else’s hard work. Plus, she also added the comment that the phrase was actually “in dispute.”

Seriously? Of course, someone in a workshop will pipe up something like, “I washed one once” when referring to their own car-renting experiences, but under a followup question, they also admit that they did it because they totally trashed the car and were worried that the rental agency would fine them or something, or that their spouse was so appalled by the awfulness of the exterior that he or she would not get into that car!

The explanation actually reinforces my point precisely. People do NOT take very good care of things they do not own. The reality is that some people might actually wash a rental car, but they sure don’t take good care of them. It reminds me of the old joke:

What goes faster than any police car, handles speed bumps and potholes like a Humvee, corners faster with more screeching tires than a drifting WMV, and can crash through small trees and bushes like a tank?

Give up? It’s a Rental Car!!

If you have ever owned a house you rented, you will know precisely what I mean. Or, if you ever lent someone some of your tools or a book, you may come to understand that the ownership has just been functionally transferred…

“But Scott,” you might say, “You write on issues of people and performance, about organizational improvement. What is this “rental car” stuff?”

Simply put, you cannot expect the people to support you to buy into ideas for improvement and change unless they have some ownership involvement in generating those ideas or in putting together an implementation plan. It might look something like this:

On the left, we have typical organizational reality – leader pulling and people pushing and not much alignment, engagement or communications.

On the right, we have people actively involved in making improvements to the situation, with the obvious support of the manager and others. Taking time to be involved generates engagement, can help to implement better processes, and can generate peer support and even more organizational successes down the road.

Lastly, let me end with the line-art illustration we first used in 1993 to illustrate this concept. The cartoon is actually named, Nobody ever washes a rental car, and it addresses one other issue of successfully implementing change and improvement. It looks like this:

In this case, you might consider that the wagon is now beginning to roll downhill faster than the wagon puller finds comfortable. When people feel pushed, they generally push back and resist the change. It is ownership, again, but in a situation reverse to the above. Managers can also resist changes and ideas brought to them from the teams. It is a natural thing for those who are facilitating change and innovation.

If you are interested, we sell a simple and straightforward toolkit for impacting employee ownership:

Leadership is not a simple thing. So, Heads up! Engage them where you can.

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.

You can find some powerful tools for impacting corporate teambuilding and improving organizational performance at our website, featuring The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine and our Square Wheels tools:

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

The Future of Work, The Future of The Workplace

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On September 3, 2014

In Change Facilitation, employee engagement, employee motivation, innovation, Metaphors for business improvement, productivity improvement

It’s dangerous for me to sit and read, sometimes, since my mind goes off into different dimensions. I was reading a couple of articles in Smithsonian and Mother Jones and it had me thinking about The Workplace and The Future and the reality that if we continue to do things the same way, we are going to find ourselves living in, as the ancient Chinese saying, “interesting times.”

I see a real paradox in business’ push for innovation and creativity meshed with how so many treat customers and employees. The ones that do treat the latter well tend to be demonstrably more innovative and profitable over the long term. All that data is very clear. Productivity is much higher: “Employees aren’t being asked to create a product, they are being asked to do the work previously done by four people in half the time it took just 10 years ago.” (Cliff Stevenson)

And a new client has just completed a company-wide survey showing all the many kinds of task-interferences getting directly in the way of actually demonstrating leadership skills among her managers. (She promised me the data, so more to come on that, for sure). We are demanding a LOT of people in the workplace, so much so that it is hard for them to do any workplace innovation or for managers and supervisors to do much to build collaboration and teamwork to make improvements in inter-departmental kinds of things.

SO, there I was with my mind spinning. And the thought was to try to illustrate a series of posters about the future of work and the future of the workplace…

Here is the first of them:

The funny thing is that this really seems true, with lots of data to back it up. Companies and workgroups continue to do the same things, over and over, and expect improvements to occur. A few companies are doing things so differently and better than their competitors that they have significant, sustainable differences in operational data and in things like creativity and innovation.

After initially posting this up, I am back an hour later adding another to this series. This is also characteristic of a lot of workplaces:

While some just plod along like they always have, thump thump thump thump.

AND LOOK AT ALL THE PROGRESS WE HAVE MADE!

But the reality is that the Round Wheels already exist and we can choose to do some things differently to make improvements. You can CHOOSE to do things more better faster. Innovative Ideas are at hand, if only you might step back from the wagon!

You might also find this slideshare to be of interest. It was suggested that I link to it. The focus is on making the office environment more worker-friendly and supporting through the use of lighting, furniture and design. Click on this textlink.

Check out our Square Wheels Icebreaker Toolkit – $20!

(And pop back in here to see more in this series of thoughts. I will put them up individually in the poems blog and try to add more into this post.)

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

A Dance of Change – something new?

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On May 23, 2014

In Brain and Behavior, Change Facilitation, Continuous continuous improvement, employee engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, innovation, intrinsic motivation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, motivation in the workplace, ownership involvement

It was funny to read a little blurb in the ASTD Training & Development magazine about an article to appear next month. The abstract said that 70% of change initiatives continue to fail (which is on par with how many strategy improvement initiatives are not really successful) and that the existing change models are all pretty good.

What is suggested is that The Missing Component is now Emotional Intelligence, and that thoughts and feelings that emerge from the understanding for the need to change are all that needs to be changed. “When emotional intelligence is applied to change, we can think of it as change intelligence.”

I won’t mention the author of this, since I am basically panning this solution — Emotional Intelligence is not an easy thing to grasp, much less implement since it has so much to do with personal growth and personality. We’ve been fooling with EI concepts for 20+ years, just like we’ve been proposing 7 Habits and all sorts of other silver bullets to solve the problems of organizational improvement.

I’m one who very strongly feels that we just need to forget about so many complicated models of how things work and how things need to have some new Training Solution proposed by a cadre of consultants who will retire on these efforts.

The DATA say that not much has improved on the basic issue of employee engagement. The DATA say that lots of things are supposedly important, like Innovation (rated important 98% of survey respondents in another ASTD article (Patty Gaul, April 2014) while also finding that only 33% of organizations currently focus their innovation on small improvements and change. That article predicts a BIG shift toward radical changes / innovation — 66% in the future. (Right… Remind me to look back in 10 years… )

People suggest that we do all kinds of expensive and complex kinds of training on emotional intelligence or on innovation and creative thinking skills but I STILL think that the basic organization works like this:

How things really work in most organizations…

and that what are needed are really simply solutions. Here are my 10 steps for improving motivation and organizational performance results:

How do you implement change? Identify the Square Wheels and ask for some Round Wheel solutions. Do this in the context of moving from where we are now to where we want to go (in the near or far future). Celebrate small successes to generate continuous continuous improvement and allow people to work together in simple teams (with necessary resources of time and funding) to actually implement such changes and improvements.

Four Simple Factors for Implementing Change

The actual end result is also pretty simple to conceptualize:

I mean, this whole thing about involving and engaging people in workplace improvement is really the simple task of involving and engaging them in workplace improvement. Where is the rocket science in all this? Why do we keep adding so much complexity — other than for profit motives and self-aggrandizement — when the reality is really easy to accomplish.

The other key is also simple:

This concept is also simple: Everybody needs to feel like they have an ownership stake in the ideas and the outcomes, even the management team.

So. Keep it Simple. And Just DO it!

We sell simple tools for involving and engaging people for performance improvement. Give the icon a click and check us out,

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.

LEGO® is a trademark of the The LEGO Group

Moron ENGAGEMENT, is it even possible today

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On May 6, 2014

In Change Facilitation, Continuous continuous improvement, employee engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, intrinsic motivation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, ownership involvement

The conversations about time availability for coaching and team building by supervisors continue to get interesting. There is an interesting article at the Washington Post called, “How a company weekly meeting winds up consuming 300,000 hours per year” and written by Fred Barbash.

He cites the authors at Bain, who said:

“As astonishing” as the figures are, say the authors, “300,000 person hours supporting one weekly excom meeting — it’s important to remember that it doesn’t include the work time [not in meetings] preparing for meetings. Research shows that 15% of an organization’s collective time is spent in meetings — a percentage that has increased every year since 2008. No amount of money can buy back that time….”

Go to the link above to find out more about his article and the original research.

My friend Steve Davis also writes about some of these same issues, but from a personal perspective related to values and goals. Life is not simply about how busy you are or how you want to appear. Read Steve’s perspective here.

These conversations and data from corporate research like the above simply seem to confirm that “meeting with people on engagement” does not seem to be one of the critical values of large organizations and thus we really cannot expect the supervisors to simply want to do that with what little time they have.

So, I guess things are simply supposed to look like this:

Or maybe more like this:

We have a need to Spring Forward and really make a difference with the workers in most organizations. They have ideas for improvement and we can dramatically impact intrinsic motivation if people felt like they were on the team and that management really cared.

That’s my view, and I am sticking to it.

Presently, supervisors probably do not have the time nor the inclination to rattle the cages and ask for ideas about workplace improvement. They are not empowered to form teams nor do any of these people have much “release time” in which to fine-tune and implement things.

You can find some more of my thinking at the blog I posted up yesterday:

Hopefully, we can find some ways to give supervisors more time and motivation and tools to better involve and engage their people in all aspects of workplace performance improvement,

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.

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

Category: employee engagement Page 1 of 3

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FREE The Supervisor – thoughts on Disruptive Positive Active Engagement

Disruptive Engagement, Supervisors, Empowerment and Performance Improvement

Trust in the Sand

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

Are Managers simply BAD or is it the Workplace

Square Wheels, Dr. Seuss and “suck” or “muck?”

BOSS: Spelled Backwards

Innovation and Change: BIG Sale on Square Wheels!

How many people have seen Square Wheels illustrations?

“Spring Forward Monday” For Workplace Improvement

Nobody Ever Washes a Rental Car – Ownership and Herding Cats

The Future of Work, The Future of The Workplace

A Dance of Change – something new?

So. Keep it Simple. And Just DO it!

Moron ENGAGEMENT, is it even possible today