Work Babble

Managers - 3 Ways To Show Employees You Care

March 4 is National Employee Appreciation Day. The observation started in 1995 by a founding board member of Recognition Professionals International and Workman Publishing as a way of focusing the attention of employers on employee recognition. It is celebrated on the first Friday in March each year.

Sadly, the statistics are not that encouraging in terms of employee recognition. MarketTools, Inc., released a report that polled 451 adults in February 2011.  The results revealed that most employees have issues with how companies and managers demonstrate employee appreciation.  Nearly 50% of employees surveyed have considered leaving their current jobs, and 21% have applied for another job in the past six months.  47% of survey participants indicated that salary was the lead cause of employee dissatisfaction.  Other leading causes of dissatisfaction cited include workload (24%), lack of opportunities for advancement (21%), and the employee's manager or supervisor (21%).

How can companies help employees feel more appreciated? The 3 tips below are great ways managers can acknowledge the efforts of their staff.

1. Feedback
Dissatisfaction with career growth occurs more easily when employees feel stuck in their jobs. Managers that don’t provide timely and constructive feedback will have disengaged employees. People want to know their contributions count and value coaching that improves their professional skills. Click here to learn feedback basics.

2. Recognition
Managers don’t need service awards, spot bonuses, or other elaborate methods to reward employees for strong performance. Simply observing and offering praise for working hard goes a long way. Small gestures like lunches or small token gifts can be meaningful if presented correctly and genuinely. Click here to discover more ways to provide recognition.

3. Flexibility
Not requiring vacation days for personal time, working from home, and even casual dress days, can create trust and comfort with employees. When organizations encourage a culture of accountability by being flexible to work and life balances requirements, productivity increases because employees are empowered to adapt their workload and personal demands more easily.  Click here to create a more flexible work culture.

Managers can take simple steps to improve employee appreciation and employee engagement. The main thing to do is to find connection with individuals and encourage a collaborative work environment.

Change Is Inevitable - - Except From A Vending Machine

Guest Post By Jane Murphy
Author of "What could happen if you do nothing?" A Manager's Handbook for Coaching Conversations

Robert C. Gallagher, businessman and former director of the Green Bay Packers, was right when he made this quip about change being unavoidable.  

In the face of the inevitable, we need to confront change and embrace it to make it work to our advantage. This is where the rubber meets the road.

In business, coaching anyone - from the C-suite to the factory floor - can help him or her embrace change, as well as guide and support his or her people. 

Four key behaviors are the foundation for optimal performance for people and teams during a change effort:

• Fostering a positive attitude
• Modeling open, transparent communication
• Enlisting stakeholder participation
• Supporting and reinforcing necessary behavior changes

Managers who understand and exhibit these behaviors, and encourage them in others, can expect better business outcomes.

Attitude
A positive attitude is a significant factor in dealing with change. An “up" outlook on the world energizes participation in creating long-term solutions, and helps foster innovative thinking. The hallmarks of coaching -- future-orientation and focus on outcomes -- engage people's participation and help them take ownership of the change. This engagement and ownership actually help the brain learn and sustain new behaviors.

Transparent communication
In their book Switch, Dan and Chip Heath says, "Change is easier when you know where you're going and why it's worth it."  We're much more likely to see everyone pulling in the same direction in companies that communicate openly and transparently.

Openness and honesty are always essential ingredients for engaging employees and generating optimal performance. They are a critical antidote to rumor, fear and stress. 

Stakeholder Participation
Getting everyone on board, and enlisting the participation of all those impacted by a change, demonstrates that you value your people, that you see the merit of investing them in the change process, and that you understand that the business will benefit from their input.

Support the behavior change
It's not enough to bullishly announce a change and give people the opportunity for their input. Change is hard, no matter how much sense it makes, no matter the optimism it may engender. It takes commitment, work, and the actual formation of new behaviors to transform performance. Again, the coaching process can help support this effort by encouraging: 

• Seeking new outcomes by engaging in new thinking
• Forming new habits to address intransigent problems 
• Setting SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timely) goals
• Engaging stakeholders by offering ongoing feedback and acknowledgment
• Sustaining the change with regular updates, touch-ins and tweaks

Yes, change is inevitable. Coaching gives us the tools that can help insure it will be inevitably successful.

What leadership skill(s) have you discovered in yourself helping your people through change?

© 2011 Jane Murphy, author of "What could happen if you do nothing?" A Manager's Handbook for Coaching Conversations

Author Bio
Jane Murphy is a partner in Giraffe Business Publishing LLC and Giraffe LLC, a consulting firm that designs custom solutions to help organizations improve the management capabilities of their people. Jane also leads Giraffe’s coaching engagements, working with clients to solve business and leadership challenges. Jane has been principal and co-founder of several publishing ventures, including KIDVIDZ, which won numerous awards for its special-interest videos. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation National Video Resources. She has co-authored several books, including “What could happen if you do nothing?” A manager’s handbook for coaching conversations(Giraffe Business Publishing). Jane speaks and writes regularly about coaching in the workplace.

For more information please visit http://www.coachingmojoformanagers.com/default.html follow the author on Facebook

Towards a More Harmonious Workplace: Tips for Resolving Conflict

By Tony Deblauwe

Job satisfaction and employee engagement are influenced by a number of factors – the challenge of the work, pay, and of course, who you work with. This last item can be the most challenging. Either you report to a bad boss, work with dysfunctional team, or interact with extended team members that seem to frustrate you at every turn. Point is - conflict at work is a real threat to your productivity and mental and physical health. So how can you address and resolve conflict at work? The following steps can be a great start at reducing or eliminating conflict no matter where you sit in the organizational hierarchy both up, down and sideways.   

1) Stay Grounded

It’s hard to avoid drama at work. People posture, jockey for resources, defend territories, and seek control on a regular basis.  When individuals drive with ego or agenda versus a collaborative team approach, you’re left emotionally charged and unproductive.  

The first thing you have to do is look at your behavior and adjust accordingly.  When you are in control of your emotions, the ability to be frazzled by other bad behavior is lessoned. A level head gives you focus to handle overt acts of conflict but also the passive-aggressive, roundabout behavior that can fuel team conflicts over time.

Understand a battle versus a minor incursion. Be pointed about where you spend your energy by influencing the right stakeholders who can resolve problems or redirect the issues into a positive, productive discussion. Somebody else’s emergency is not yours and if taking the higher ground makes sense then do it.

2) Stick to the Essentials.

You’ve heard the advice about not making important decisions when you are angry or emotional? This concept directly applies to managing conflict at work. A communication process means you focus on the essential pieces of getting work done. This is done objectively – what are the moving parts that you and your team have to do in order to achieve the right end game? It’s not about who is doing more or less or which group is more critical than another.  

Avoid tangents, value statements, and assumptions. State needs, gather inputs, and negotiate outcomes. You may have several private 1-1 conversations to achieve this but the point remains the same – when conflict is blinding everyone to what’s important – take a step back and stay organized around a core set of facts and business needs.

3) Focus on the Common Vision

Following conversations that stick to the essentials, you can build a communication framework and rules of engagement around common vision. Alignment in relationships helps everyone to row in the same direction. Alignment goes a long way to distracting people away from their selfish needs and concerns and re-orients them to mutually beneficial outcomes.  Leadership is key when relaying the vision because the leader can dictate what is important to achieve and the activities needed to achieve it. When co-workers understand the common vision they can begin to understand the tradeoffs and resources required to make the vision happen.

A harmonious workplace, like any long-term relationship, requires attention, patience, and understanding. Market conditions change, leadership points in new directions and organizational cultures shift. It’s not always possible to avoid conflict completely – even start-ups can run into issues. And the goal is not to only seek out people who agree with you.

Healthy conflict drives innovation and new thinking. Knowing what type of conflict you have versus assuming the worst intentions in others is important. In these cases, knowing how to form the communication to calm and refocus people on the right conversations and decision making is a vital competency that helps you with your productivity and well-being. 

Stay Sensitive to Holiday Workplace Depression

 

By Tony Deblauwe

The holiday season is usually a time for closer connections with friends and family, catching up on the year’s milestones, and taking vacation. The reality for most workers during the holidays, however, is that coping with the stress and obligations of year-end activities at home and at work is overwhelming. It’s easy to feel helpless trying to meet a variety of demands coming from all sides. Tension can build and finally, a break occurs where people withdraw completely from their life, unable and unwilling to deal with anybody or anything.   

At work, many signs can emerge that your co-workers or boss are not handling the holiday stress effectively. If your peer exhibits sudden changes in regular behavior such as complaining about headaches, has a lack of focus, is frequently irritable over small issues, impatient, stays quiet all the time, and shows indifference towards normal business activities, there might be cause for concern.

How You Can Help   

Your goal is not to diagnose or play psychologist, but to offer your support. In many cases people won’t realize they are exhibiting depressive behaviors or are aware they may be depressed. As a team mate, supportive behaviors can include:

• Helping your co-worker or boss stay organized by doing simple things like creating meeting schedules, passing along simple messages, and other non-impactful activities that help ease the burden of everyday work activities.
•  If you are a boss, help your employee set priorities with clear and straightforward expectations for completion.
• Offer encouragement. This could be you acknowledging a small email the person sent that cleared up an issue or simply being attentive and having normal conversation. It’s amazing how many workers barely talk to each other on a regular basis. Just saying hello and spending five minutes on simple updates can make a big difference.
• Stay positive and inclusive. Nothing is worse for someone feeling depressed than to feel like nobody knows what you are experiencing. And feeling further “rejected” because people “sense” you want to be left alone can expedite depressive thoughts. As a co-worker, smiling, interacting, and being funny can help jar someone out of falling into depression.  Do this even if the person is not that expressive or returns the gesture.

Other factors

In some cases depression can stem from the environment.  Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is a condition that develops for certain people as a result of being exposed to fewer hours of sunlight as the days grow shorter during the winter months. In an office setting, this can be relieved with brighter lights placed around the immediate work area. Obviously phototherapy to alleviate SAD probably won’t be something a co-worker or boss will diagnose, but if you notice the person seems to feel better in brightly lit areas like a cafeteria or break room, it may be an indicator that SAD is a factor.

During the holidays we can all experience more discomfort trying to wrap everything up in time for the New Year. If you can offer your peers some extra support when they are feeling down, you keep the individual, the team, and the business operating smoothly. And remember, if you become very concerned that your co-worker, boss, or employee is depressed, seek guidance from your Employer Assistance Program (EAP) or similar certified professional group.

Workplace Attire and Religious Views

By Tony Deblauwe

Recently a Disney employee filed a complaint with the EEOC objecting to Disney’s request she wear an alternative head attire to her Muslim head scarf (hijab) (click here for story).

This raises the question – where is the line drawn between workplace policies and employee individual freedoms? Dress codes can be a touchy subject for many employers like Disney where customer facing jobs are common. Company policies cannot violate anti-discriminatory and disability laws. Some examples:

-Banning facial hair or headwear as this could violate some religious beliefs –as we are seeing here with Disney.

-Banning facial hair as this could be discriminatory towards males who have a skin   conditions or due to religious beliefs.   

In 1999, in a case between American Airlines and the EEOC, to address concerns arising from customer service jobs with air travel, the Religious Accommodation Policy was enacted which permits the wearing of hijabs, crucifixes, yamulkes and other religious attire and jewelry by uniformed customer contact employees.  And of course, the main law is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protects people of all religious beliefs and requires employers to provide "reasonable accommodation" to allow employees to practice their religion.

But is that the case here? Disney did not refuse the right of the employee to wear the attire but wanted something else in place – why – most likely because Disney has BFOQs (Bona Fide Occupational Qualifications) for many of their customer facing jobs. This was probably their attempt at trying to create a balance between individual rights and their dress codes.

Still – in the performance of this particular job (at a restaurant) was the requirement applicable? It will be interesting to see if we get more details on the case; in the meantime, it’s important to review dress code policy and potential impact on religious views or other practices protected by law.

What do you think?

Resources:

http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/performance-conduct.html#dress

http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/backlash-employer.html

http://humanresources.about.com/od/workrelationships/tp/dress_code_collect.htm