There is still much uncertainty surrounding our economy, and lately it seems that no news is the only good news around. So how do we engage and motivate employees in an information vacuum?
One thing leaders can do is to increase their visibility and communicate more about how the company is doing—not less.
Here a few things you can do today:
- Walk the hallways. Schedule a weekly reminder to take the long way to your office. Let employees see and you, and engage in conversation.
- Engage employees on all shifts. You don’t need to sit in every meeting or walk through every building every day. But you do want your employees to know that they matter—even if they work the night shift.
- Eat in the cafeteria. By simply saying “hello” or eating lunch with other employees, you increase your visibility, as well as your credibility.
- Leave your office door open. Let employees walking by know that you are there. Leaders have a tendency to shut the door when times get tough, but it makes employees think there is trouble and secrecy afoot.
By taking a few minutes out of your day, making yourself more visible, and increasing your communication frequency, you reduce employee anxiety and uncertainty. Increasing visibility is just one part of motivating employees—but it’s a crucial part. Actions speak, and now is the time to let employees know you are there for them.
At a time when travel costs are being slashed like jungle growth run riot, videoconferencing has stood out as a, if not the low cost alternative to conducting business face-to-face. After all, isn’t videoconferencing, with its increasing quality and decreasing costs, the perfect substitute for face-to-face interaction?
Well…. maybe not. Videoconferencing is hard work; to be effective, it requires more attention and focus on the mechanics of conversation than face-to-face interaction. You’ve got to pay a bit more attention to the speaker’s speech rhythm and pauses so that you don’t interrupt. It’s not easy, which is why there are often those unnatural seconds of silence in videoconferencing, and why it’s not always clear when it’s your turn to speak. Speaker clarity is often a problem, which means you have to listen more closely to understand what is being said. And it is harder not to act a bit more formal during a videoconference – the medium often feels less natural, as does the flow of the conversation.
Because videoconferencing requires us to pay more attention to the mechanics of the conversation, we have less attention and brainpower to devote to the content. As a result, we tend to rely more on non-content cues to assess the effectiveness of the interaction – the speaker’s dress, looks, tone-of-voice, age, titles, etc. To put it another way, when using videoconferencing, as compared to face-to-face interaction, participants are more likely to assess the effectiveness of the interaction on the likeability of the speakers than on the content of what they said.
Sound a bit far-fetched? But that is exactly what two researchers found when they compared the assessments of a medical seminar between those who attended the seminar in person, and those who participated by videoconferencing. As they put it:
In this study, participants in the videoconference seminars reported being more influenced by how much they liked the speaker than by their assessment of the quality of the arguments presented, whereas those attending the seminar face-to-face reported just the opposite.
Interesting results, suggesting, not that we abandon videoconferencing – which isn’t going to happen anyway – but that we become a bit more cognizant of how we use it.
You can find the an abstract of the research here:
http://mansci.journal.informs.org/cgi/content/abstract/54/9/1565
In our current economy, uncertainty seems to be the only thing that’s certain when it comes to organizational finances. As a result, cost cutting is a recurring theme for organizations around the country and across the globe. While there’s no single right way to cut costs, organizations are finding that successful cost-cutting efforts require employees to understand the situation, know leadership’s expectations, and see a need to cut costs if they expect employees to buy in.
Similar to other organizational priorities, cost cutting should follow a typical communication protocol (i.e. communicate consistently and frequently through various vehicles and channels to ensure all employees receive the message). But there’s more. To garner employee support for major cost-cutting efforts, we recommend the following:
1) Explain financial goals simply.
Enlist senior leaders and managers to translate cost-cutting messages for their teams. Managers know what works for their teams and understand how to make cost cutting a real priority in their department. Employees are more likely to take part in the process if they know how they can make a difference in their daily work.
2) Walk the talk.
Lead by example – your cost-cutting message will lose credibility if you don’t practice what you preach. If you tell employees to be fiscally conservative and then openly purchase expensive decor for the office, employees will disregard all the hard work that’s gone into the cost-cutting effort. As a leader, everything you do communicates a message, so be sure that your actions illustrate the importance of cost cutting. A recent Wall Street Journal article states:
Before asking others to sacrifice, first volunteer yourself. If there are sacrifices to be made – and there will be – then the leaders should step up and make the greatest sacrifices themselves… Everyone is watching to see what the leaders do. Will they stay true to their values? Will they bow to external pressures, or confront the crisis in a straightforward manner?… (You can read the full article here.)
If you’re open and honest about your spending choices, employees will follow suit.
Achieving employee support for organizational cost cutting is no easy feat and requires dedication from everyone involved, especially leadership. Therefore, following the two points mentioned above will not only position your organization for a better financial situation, it will increase employee support so your workforce is aligned around your cost-cutting priority.
“Does the strategic message really matter?”
Simply put, the answer is yes. We know, now more than ever, that a strong strategic message not only reduces uncertainty among employees and provides the context necessary to make sense of initiative-level actions and messages, but it also aligns and guides the leadership team. On the other hand, a poorly designed strategy message can lead to a skeptical workforce and a severely misaligned leadership team.
As a result of the economic downturn and to survive the financial slump, companies are changing how they operate. In doing so, some organizations are going back to the drawing board to revise and refresh their strategic message to align with how they’re now doing business. Others acknowledge the need to update their strategic message, but are hesitant to do so for fear that employees will resist the change and leadership will lose credibility.
If you’re thinking about revisiting your organization’s strategic message, here are a few recommendations for doing so in a way that promotes employee buy-in and builds leadership credibility.
Review recent decisions and messages.
Hold up your current strategy message against the most recent actions and decisions of the leadership team. If one of your current strategic priorities is to ‘invest in innovation” and you’ve recently cut your research and development budget for 2009, then it’s probably time to re-think your business priorities and change your strategy message for the year.
Measure employee understanding.
Research offers a credible, concrete, data-driven way to validate or support your argument, and having a sense of the pulse of the organization often yields access to the leadership team. For example, conducting a strategic alignment survey that assesses the credibility of the message set and the leadership team, as well as the level of employee understanding of and engagement with the current strategy message, may give you just the ammunition you need to gain senior leadership support for a revised strategy.
Get leadership on board.
Brief the leadership team, discuss the importance of a strong strategy message, and address the need to and consequences (positive and negative) of updating the message set. Be prepared to talk candidly about the fact that everything they do as leaders sends a message. Share the findings from your employee research to help shape your argument and support your proposal.
Don’t underestimate the importance of a clear, actionable strategy message—and don’t let your leadership underestimate it either. To read more about why the message really does matter click here.
I heard an entertaining piece on the radio this morning by Frank Deford that I think is worth sharing. You can read or listen to it here. What you’ll hear is simple and timely, but hard to grasp for many at the top of their game in business and sports.
Whether you’re a hedge fund manager or a wide receiver, take note. Perhaps the rising tide of public expectations for leaders’ behavior on Wall Street should also apply to our favorite good athletes/bad sports on the field. In times like this, when the average American is working harder than ever before to make ends meet, perhaps people like Terrell Owens and Manny Ramirez should manage their ego and play harder too. And if they don’t, their leaders and the public should be less forgiving.
Here’s hoping that my hometown of Buffalo does a better job than my current city of Philadelphia at Managing T.O. We’ll see … either way, at least the Phillies got it right last year (see article for details).
The last six months have resulted in more employees in transition than ever before. As people find themselves working for a new employer or in a different role within their organization, managers must figure out how to on-board new team members as quickly as possible and effective superior-subordinate communication plays a large role.
You can increase how quickly new team members adjust to your management style by considering the following when setting expectations:
Inform employees of your expectations by sharing them in a way that is clear, concise, and easy to understand. Doing this puts your employees in a place where they can succeed and not in the position of becoming a mind reader. Communicating expectations takes time up front, but it saves everyone time in the end.
Evaluate the credibility of your expectations by inquiring about your employee’s bandwidth. Ask if they are working on any other projects right now and how much time those projects are consuming. If they do not have the availability you need you will have to reset your expectations for their involvement.
Clarify that the message sent is the message received. Have a conversation with your employee about the next steps they plan to take in the projects you have assigned. Their response will help you to gauge how well they understand your expectations and allows you to address misunderstandings, if any, before anyone heads in the wrong direction.
At CRA, we ask leaders: “What do you want your employees to know, believe, do, and feel?” We stress that the ultimate goal is the “do” part – getting employees to act how you want them to act. In the communication literature, there are two theoretical approaches – the theory of reasoned action (TRA) and the theory of planned behavior (TPB) – that predict voluntary behavior. In the first installment of this two-part series I will discuss Ajzen and Fishbein’s TRA and how it can predict employee behavior.
The best predictor of behavior is intention. The TRA suggests that an individual’s intention to perform or not perform is a result of two factors: attitudes toward the behavior and normative pressure. So how can you influence intention and get employees to live your strategy? You have to control:
Attitudes toward the behavior: An employee’s attitude toward a behavior is based on his / her beliefs concerning the outcomes that follow action. In order to motivate employees to action, they must believe that living the organization’s strategy will be beneficial to them. You must ensure that:
- Positive consequences follow performance and negative consequences follow nonperformance.
- Employees believe that positive consequences are valuable and negative consequences are undesirable.
Normative pressure: Intention and subsequent action are also influenced by employees’ perceptions of whether key stakeholders support the behavior. Leaders, peers, and mentors can influence whether an individual’s actions align with the organizational goals. You must ensure that:
- Leaders support the strategy, and their own decisions and actions reinforce the expectations they place on employees.
- Employees participate in groups with other employees.
Stay tuned for the follow-up post in which I describe the theory of planned behavior, which builds off of the TRA.
Given the current state of our economy, it shouldn’t be surprising to any of us that it’s difficult to get people to pay attention to anything else. But, when you’re making changes to keep the organization afloat, you need your employees to hear and believe what you’re saying.
So, how do you get some instant credibility; how can you demonstrate that you really mean what you say? Whether you want to highlight the importance of a new initiative, a shift in direction, or compliance issues—as a researcher, I’ve found one of the strongest “convincing decisions” that leaders can make to demonstrate they really care about something on their leadership agenda is to measure…then act.
As organizations increasingly rely on metrics and dashboards to guide employee efforts, a highly effective way to get people’s attention is to ask for their feedback about whether (and how well) your efforts are moving the organization in the right direction—and then to be very transparent about what you heard from them and how you plan to act on it. And, this approach offers some nice side benefits: (1) You make better decisions when you know the landscape in which you’re operating and (2) you’re more likely to get employee buy-in for your plans when you’ve listened to their input first.
