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IVPart The Practice

of Engagement

171Jaramillo, Santiago, and Todd Richardson. Agile Engagement : How to Drive Lasting Results by Cultivating a Flexible, Responsive, and Collaborative Culture, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/harrisburg-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4745628. Created from harrisburg-ebooks on 2020-11-11 04:39:02.

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Jaramillo, Santiago, and Todd Richardson. Agile Engagement : How to Drive Lasting Results by Cultivating a Flexible, Responsive, and Collaborative Culture, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/harrisburg-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4745628. Created from harrisburg-ebooks on 2020-11-11 04:39:02.

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30Chapter Speak with One Voice (Or, Why Conformity Is Good

Sometimes)

L et’s pause. If you have been following along, you now have yourvery own Engagement Canvas, tailored to fit your organization.Congratulations! We want to take a moment to invite you to peruse and join our online

community at www.AgileEngagementBook.com. Because culture is a pro- cess, we want to be able to continue the conversation, share more stories and examples, and help you through the journey.

Now comes the fun part: execution. In your snazzy new Engagement Canvas, you unearthed several key strategic priorities. For the next six months, pick a few of them and focus your efforts there. The essence of strategy is already choosing what not to do, and even among what we do choose, we can’t do it all. So start small. This will be an ongoing process. In six months, reassess, realign, and reboot. When it comes to culture, sometimes incremen- tal, sincere progress is best. Take it in small strategic objective chunks, and you will make meaningful progress toward forming, enhancing, and cultivating your culture.

As you are carrying out these strategic objectives, roadblocks will surface. We have compiled a list of pointers, situations that may present themselves, and practical tips to help you to overcome them. The process manifests dif- ferently for everyone. Some of these may be irrelevant or already assumed in

173Jaramillo, Santiago, and Todd Richardson. Agile Engagement : How to Drive Lasting Results by Cultivating a Flexible, Responsive, and Collaborative Culture, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/harrisburg-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4745628. Created from harrisburg-ebooks on 2020-11-11 04:39:02.

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174 AGILE ENGAGEMENT

your organization, and others may be your lifeline. But they are all things that we, or people we have worked with, have faced in the process of forging and tending to our cultures, and we choose to share them candidly because we believe they offer insight and guidance.

During the time we were writing this book, Todd asked a CEO how he would describe his company’s culture. He replied, “You know, that’s a good question, I have never been asked that before.” To that we say:

• Even if you have not previously considered your culture, or been asked about it by pesky culture enthusiasts such as ourselves, the fact is, culture is becoming a recognized pillar of the workplace. Gallup released their study on the state of the global workplace in 2013, and many people hurriedly jumped on board the cul- ture/engagement movement (Crabtree, 2013). In 2014, culture was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year (2014 Word of the Year, 2014). It is becoming normalized, and more people than ever will be asking about it. If you are not already making this a priority, you should be.

• Furthermore, even if no one is asking you about it, that is no reason you should not be taking the initiative yourself to describe, culti- vate, and promote your culture. At ExactTarget, we championed our culture like it was our job ( . . . it was) and there were always a few naysayers who thought we were outlandish or did not realize the significance of culture. But we did. And when we went public, we included “culture” as a distinct differentiator in our initial public offering filing, which was the first time such a thing had been done. No, of course culture was not the sole reason for our success, but it was the foundation on which everything else was built.

We encourage you to talk about culture with investors. Take it into account when you interview employees and partners. We have already estab- lished it is important, so it is time we treat it that way. When describing your culture, you should do the following:

• Be explicit. Define your culture in specific terms. Don’t say it is “good” or “strong,” say what makes it that way. Show, don’t tell.

• Be consistent. Is the elevator pitch that the CEO gives about the culture the same spiel that HR distills throughout the company

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Speak with One Voice 175

and that rank-and-file employees say to their friends and family? If executives tout your shining accolades while low-level employees bewail the inner horrors, who do you think people will believe?

• Be empowering. Beyond ensuring that everyone is on the same page of what your culture is, make sure each person understands his or her ability and responsibility to create and sustain it. Culture starts with each of us.

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31Chapter Brand What’s Important

(Or, Why Marketing Should Live in HR)

B y now, I’m sure we have you hoodwinked, thinking this was a bookabout HR, not marketing. But, these two departments go hand inhand (or at least they should) in order to truly engage employees and create a culture worth bragging about. Bye-bye jagged, hand-cut construction paper desk drops about open enrollment. Sayonara cheap starchy t-shirts for volunteer day. Adios 16-paragraph Outlook emails about tax documents (rife with typos).

Employees are like curious, spongy toddlers in the sense that they watch everything we do and listen to everything we say. They notice when we say something is important, but then turn around and refuse to approve any time or resources for the project. They notice when we only care about culture events that are sexy enough for a company press release. They notice when we boast a set of core values but act in exactly the opposite fashion when the going gets tough. They notice everything.

This brings us to the topic of branding. As organizations, we brand what is important to us, or in more general terms, we expend resources on what we value. Plain and simple, if you want to see what we value as people, don’t listen to what we say, look at how we spend our time and our money. Same goes for organizations. Let’s do a quick assessment. Look at your internal culture and communications budget. Is it miniscule? Do you even have one? Can you spot it tucked away somewhere on the balance sheet?

177Jaramillo, Santiago, and Todd Richardson. Agile Engagement : How to Drive Lasting Results by Cultivating a Flexible, Responsive, and Collaborative Culture, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/harrisburg-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4745628. Created from harrisburg-ebooks on 2020-11-11 04:39:02.

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178 AGILE ENGAGEMENT

Recognize first how telling the numbers are as opposed to the lip ser- vice, and candidly acknowledge how much value you’re actually giving your culture. That is not to say that all culture initiatives hit your pocketbook. Many do not. But executives who boast about their cultures all the live long day, while refusing to spend a dime to advance them, won’t last. Culture requires deliberately investing in your people. It means taking resources like money, time, and sometimes even headcount to brand what you claim matters most to you.

Case in Point: ExactTarget

One of Todd’s favorite examples of internal branding came from his time at ExactTarget. As the company continued to hire rapidly, the size and frequency of the onboarding program exploded. With so many new employees going through this process, and gleaning their first impressions of the company, Todd’s team took a good hard look at the program’s branding. Mismatched documents, confusing processes, outdated designs, and lengthy text emails did not represent the company’s young, fun-loving, vibrant Orange culture.

Hence, Todd commissioned a full rebrand of the program using a mix of HR and marketing resources. The result was Officially Orange, a cohesive and beautiful program with its own professional logo, marketing materials, swag, branded emails, and professional head shots; a stunning participant work- book complete with crossword puzzles; an ExactTarget glossary; ads for HR programs and events; and more.

Not only did the program’s facelift get the attention of new employees, who felt welcomed, invigorated, and Orange to the core, Officially Orange captured the hearts of the leadership team and helped change their view of HR as a department. As they continued to dedicate resources to branding high-visibility programs like the ExactTarget Cuties New Parent Program and the ExactWIN women’s group, the leadership team and employees at large began to realize that HR was far more than forms, filing, and firing; they were culture beacons and brand-savvy communicators.

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32Chapter Treat Employees Like

Customers (Or, Why We’re All Created Equal)

C onsider the Golden Rule: Treat others as you wish to be treated. In business, this has historically translated to treating our customers like our most valuable assets. Companies commonly invest upwards

of 25 percent of their budget on customer service and customer communica- tions yet dedicate less than 1 percent of their budgets to employee marketing.

To be clear, we agree that customer service and marketing are paramount to business success. If we do not execute well in these areas, no one will care how superior, polished, and well-positioned our products and services are. If customers do not feel valued, understand what makes our company unique, and fully commit to our product over competitors, our business will eventually flatline.

Amen to all of that. But it is not nearly enough. We advocate for extending this beyond customer service. As business leaders (and especially HR leaders), we need to approach employee marketing, measurement, and invest- ment with the same tenacity as they approach their customer equivalents. In short, treat employees as well as you treat customers.

Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, says it best: “You can’t expect your employees to exceed the expectations of your customers if you don’t exceed the employees’ expectations of management” (Smith, 1998).

179Jaramillo, Santiago, and Todd Richardson. Agile Engagement : How to Drive Lasting Results by Cultivating a Flexible, Responsive, and Collaborative Culture, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/harrisburg-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4745628. Created from harrisburg-ebooks on 2020-11-11 04:39:02.

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180 AGILE ENGAGEMENT

Brad Morehead, CEO of LiveWatch Security agrees:

We found our culture and engagement were highly correlated with our customer satisfaction and retention. We measured customer satisfaction using Net Promoter Score and retention by looking at churn on a daily basis. In general, if we saw any issues in customer satisfaction or churn (and it wasn’t related to an obvious product or service outage), then it was typically related to company culture, morale, management or training. Money is necessary, but not suf- ficient for motivating teams. While people do tend to do what you pay them to do, they are capable of so much more. Culture is an amplifier for productivity. When culture is positive, productivity is amplified. (Morehead, 2016)

As employees ourselves, we inherently want this to be true, we want to be treated with the same care and commitment as customers. Yet, head to your local bookstore’s business section, and you will find dozens of titles about how to build, grow, and evolve your approach to customer service. Everyone understands that customer success begets business success, and we see this clearly demonstrated in how much time and money organizations spend on customer marketing, communications, and service.

Next, browse for books about corporate culture. You will find dozens of additional titles that promise to help you build, grow, and evolve powerful cultures like those of Zappos and Patagonia. We obviously applaud that also. Now, peruse the section related to corporate marketing. You will come face to spine with a plethora of books addressing every facet of marketing—how to target campaigns, how to study your audiences, how often to send messages, and everything in between. Awesome.

Finally, search high and low for books about how to implement world- class employee marketing and communications. We guarantee you will not find many, if any, titles on the topic. As business leaders and HR enthusiasts, we are beyond baffled by this gap. We all seem to accept the reality of employees serving customers. We spend countless hours reading, meeting, and speaking about how to deliver world-class customer service, as we should.

But what about the importance of leaders serving employees? How much time do we spend perfecting the noble craft of employee marketing? Sure, affordable, comprehensive benefits are a good start. Meaningful volunteer opportunities and gracious paid time off help too. But that’s only the beginning. We are calling for a radical rethinking of every single employee touch point.

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Treat Employees Like Customers 181

Consider your current customer communications (likely owned by the marketing team): scrutinized at length, designed with care, professionally printed or delivered through user-friendly channels. Beautiful. Now contrast that with your current employee communications, likely consisting of plain text emails, newsletters tossed together in Microsoft Publisher and printed ever so slightly off-center on the office copier, company meeting PowerPoints bursting at the seams with cluttered bullet points and cheesy animated gifs. Please, for the sake of all that’s good and green in the world, get your head out of the 1990s and disavow tacky clip art forever.

We firmly believe that if you take care of your employees first, they will then take better care of your customers. Unfortunately, this belief is not widely shared in the business world, with actions not following the lip service it often receives.

So if employee and customer communications hold equal value to their constituencies, why, then, do we so often grant such superior design, messag- ing, and delivery to our customer audiences? The age of such foul inequality is over. The good news? Your organization already has a playbook for how to treat employees. It’s the same way you treat your customers.

Here’s how you can start.

Realize Looks Matter

Nonmarketers often believe it’s the message, not the method, that matters most. In reality, it’s both. Every email, every digital slide on an office TV, every sign, every desk drop, every mobile app notification, and every event needs to be executed at a high level of professionalism that reinforces the message. Employees respond to solid creative communications as much (if not more) than customers do. It lets them know they are important to the organization. It makes them feel part of something bigger.

Use a tone, style, and quality that you would award to customers. At ExactTarget, we took weary HR efforts and turned them into masterpieces. One year, instead of sending out a routine Outlook email begging for employ- ees to sign up for a new benefits plan, we created video spoofs about open enrollment, including cinematic inspirations like The Hangover and The Fast and The Furious. We even spoofed Office Space, complete with clobbering an old copy machine, with baseball bats, on film. Did this effort take money? Yes. But it achieved the desired result and then some. We had 99 percent of employees enrolled within 48 hours of the deadline.

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182 AGILE ENGAGEMENT

Secure Marketing Resources

We set the bar high for customer communications because the marketers exe- cuting those communications are uniquely qualified to develop compelling communications across design, messaging, and delivery. Employee commu- nications, on the other hand, are typically planned, created, and delivered by HR team members who, though qualified in many areas, usually lack specific training in communications and marketing.

Fear not. You have options. Try giving your employee communications and marketing campaigns professional polish by (a) requesting design and creative assistance from the marketing department, (b) allocating HR budget to hire external marketing agencies or freelance creatives, or (c) cross-train your team members on design basics and tools via online and offline courses.

While at ExactTarget, Todd was so passionate about marketing well to employees that he recruited one of the marketing team’s veterans to join HR full time. It was an unorthodox move, but it paid off. For the cost of a single headcount, every campaign, program, and communication HR exe- cuted looked like it came from the marketing team. Employees sat up and took notice. Leadership sat up and took notice. Best of all, other members of the HR team saw their hard work presented in professional ways that improved the way the rest of the company viewed their roles and contributions.

Create an Employee Advisory Board

Companies use customer advisory boards to understand needs and gather feedback about products and services. These groups provide customers with a unique sense of value, influence, and camaraderie. Unlike customers, employ- ees rarely have a robust and regular forum to share suggestions, feedback, and ideas. Why should companies give customers more control over products, services, and overall direction of the company than their own employees?

Form an employee advisory board comprised of key influencers and your most engaged employees across the organization. Give the group direct access to company leadership and solicit their opinions on business and employee matters. Not only will this help increase employee engagement, it will also give you invaluable insights into the hearts and minds of your employees and prove that employee feedback is a critical part of the company’s direction and evolution.

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Treat Employees Like Customers 183

Regularly Solicit and Act on Employee Feedback

Most companies monitor and measure customer feedback on a constant basis. From postpurchase surveys to product reviews and focus groups, companies treat customer feedback data like gold. Employee surveys, on the other hand, are typically conducted annually, if that. When results are gathered, the feed- back is rarely acted on. Or, worse, surveyors spend six months conducting, six months digesting results, and another six months communicating those results back. So 18 months later, the organization can start to address the issues at hand and make substantive change. But of course by then the issues at hand have resolved themselves or long since been swept into some forlorn corner, and all that effort was for naught.

Instead, let’s try something that is actually useful. At Emplify, we con- duct smaller, frequent, randomized surveys via mobile app tools to garner con- tinuous feedback and improvement. Consider partnering with a third-party employee survey group or creating an internal employee survey cadence. Then share high-level results back with employees, tell them what actions you’re going to take based on their feedback, and hold yourself accountable for following through on those promises. Make sure leadership communicates what will be done, and do not solicit more feedback until you respond to the first round.

Ask Employees to Drive Meaningful Change

The weight of the employee engagement world does not rest solely on your shoulders. Invite employees to help brainstorm opportunities and solutions, and then listen to what they say. Empower employees to affect changes them- selves, and provide them the avenue and funding to make it happen.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, gives a fantastic example of pre- cisely this in his book Behind the Cloud: In the early days, Sue, a support analyst, asked what the company was doing about the environment. Marc said, “I’m not sure. You have six paid days to figure it out, I’ll support you.” She did and eventually went on to become the company’s first sustainability manager (Benioff & Adler, 2009, 162).

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184 AGILE ENGAGEMENT

Implement Employee-Related Change Management Strategies

Companies agonize over how to communicate important (and sometimes minute) business changes to their customers. Leaders take painstaking care to ensure they communicate key information clearly, concisely, and consistently. It’s not uncommon for companies to deliver the message across multiple chan- nels and measure engagement and reception.

Employee-related changes should be planned, drafted, and delivered with the same (if not more) intentionality as customer communications. Last-minute, half-baked, one-time, email-only employee communications don’t cut it anymore. From leadership changes to process changes, use a thoughtful, cross-channel, measurable communication plan that gives employees the information they need in a format they can digest. Consider videos, live meetings, desk drops, text message or mobile app alerts, and FAQs. Make sure every communication includes a clear path for employees to ask questions or voice concerns.

Educate and Enlighten HR Staff

Whether you partner with your corporate marketing team, use external firms, or have the benefit of hiring dedicated communications staff within HR, make education a priority. Every member of your HR organization needs to understand the value of professional, polished employee communications and internal marketing. Spend time educating them about how and when to engage with marketing/creative team members. Explain how HR bene- fits from putting more time and resources into internal communications. Celebrate successes as a team to build momentum around effective campaigns. Only once every member of your HR team understands the value of market- ing and communications will your team truly begin firing on all cylinders.

In the end, we push for this so resolutely because how you treat people affects what they believe about themselves and, in turn, how they treat others.

Case in Point: Manchester Bidwell

Bill Strickland epitomizes this concept in a profound way. He has figured out how to engage his constituents, transform their mindsets, and completely revolutionize their performance. He does not run a tech startup or a For- tune 100 company, yet we find his example even more telling. He takes high

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Treat Employees Like Customers 185

school dropouts from the Pittsburgh ghetto, rallies them with beauty, dig- nity, and hope, and sees more than 80 percent of them go to college. He runs an organization called Manchester Bidwell, which offers high school arts per- formances and various other programs to serve the community (OurHistory, 2016). These include high school arts education, adult career training, and jazz performances. They all operate on the fundamental principle that you have to change the way people see themselves before you can change their behaviors.

If you walk into their arts museum, one of the first things to catch your eye will be a lovely fountain in the courtyard. Strickland also serves on the board of the Carnegie Museum and noticed that they had a fountain because they think that the people who go to the museum deserve one. “Well,” he says, “I think that welfare mothers and at-risk kids and ex-steel workers deserve a fountain in their lives.” So he put one there, to set top-notch attitudes and expectations right from the start (Strickland, 2008).

They also keep real flowers in the hallways, and Strickland describes how so often visitors say to him, “Mr. Strickland, what an extraordinary story and what a great school. And we were particularly touched by the flowers and we were curious as to how the flowers got there.” “Well,” he responds, “I got in my car and I went out to the greenhouse and I bought them and I brought them back and I put them there. You don’t need a task force or a study group to buy flowers for your kids. What you need to know is that the children and the adults deserve flowers in their life. The cost is incidental but the gesture is huge. And so in my building, which is full of sunlight and full of flowers, we believe in hope and human possibilities” (Strickland, 2008).

Every day, they have 400 high school students who were flunking out of the public school system show up for arts education. And for the last 15 years, they’ve put an average of more than 80 percent of those students in college. “We’ve made a fascinating discovery,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with the kids that affection and sunshine and food and enthusiasm and music can’t cure. For that I won a big old plaque for Man of the Year in Education. I beat out all the Ph.D.’s because I figured that if you treat children like human beings, it increases the likelihood they’re going to behave that way. And why we can’t institute that policy in every school and in every city and every town remains a mystery to me” (Strickland, 2008).

First and foremost, we applaud Strickland’s transformative efforts and the tremendous work he and his organization continue to do. We assert his belief that people will show you world class behavior if you treat them that way. And we echo his question: Why can’t we institute policies like that in every school, every city, every organization?

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186 AGILE ENGAGEMENT

Trickle-Down Effect

If you need a purely business reason to follow this advice (and you shouldn’t), remember that your employees’ engagement will directly affect your cus- tomers’ experience with your company. That, in turn, affects your bottom line and public image.

“All employees are ambassadors for your company,” says Gary Reynolds of Reynolds Farm Equipment. “Most of your customers’ interactions are with employees, not leadership” (Reynolds, 2016).

If you want a deeper reason to follow our advice (and we hope you do), consider this: Whether you deal with high school kids or stock brokers, welfare mothers or software developers, call center representatives, C-suite executives, customers, investors, or employees, treat them like you want to be treated, treat them like you treat customers, and treat them like world-class human beings.

Austrian neurologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl relays a sim- ilar concept in his book Man’s Search for Meaning (Frankl, 1972). If we take people as they really are, he posits, we make them worse. But if we overes- timate them, we promote them to what they really can be. Presuppose the spark in people, and you will elicit that spark from them. You will help them become what they are in principle already capable of becoming.

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33Chapter Leverage Data

(Or, Why There’s No Shame in Nerdiness)

T he last thing you want to do is pour a lot of time and money intomarketing to employees and have no way to prove whether or notit worked. Return on investment is measurable, even in people ana- lytics. Back in the 1800s, physicist William Thomson (also known as Lord Kelvin, of the Kelvin scale of temperature) presented the view that “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it,” (Lord Kelvin). Peter Drucker later commandeered those words to our familiar “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” And we have continued to adopt that sentiment, incorporate it into various tools like Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control (DMAIC) and Six Sigma, and apply it to fields from marketing to clinical health care trials to code quality to body composition.

We painstakingly measure so much in our businesses, including sales performance, search engine optimization, margins, and expenses. After all, you are what you measure. If a firm measures A and B, but not X and Y, people will naturally focus on A and B. Employees are smart; they know how to pay attention to what their leaders value. If I see my manager measuring and judging how much I can cut costs but not how satisfied consumers are, I will naturally prioritize expenses to the detriment of customer happiness.

Despite this, alarmingly few organizations apply the same measurement rigor to their cultures. We know it’s important. We know it enhances employee engagement. The question is, how the heck are we supposed to

187Jaramillo, Santiago, and Todd Richardson. Agile Engagement : How to Drive Lasting Results by Cultivating a Flexible, Responsive, and Collaborative Culture, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/harrisburg-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4745628. Created from harrisburg-ebooks on 2020-11-11 04:39:02.

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gauge it? How can we measure the positive and negative aspects of our cultures and improve our shortcomings?

For perspective, check out these disconcerting employee engagement statistics from 2014 (The 2014 Employee Engagement Organizational Cul- ture Report, 2014):

• 64 percent do not feel they have a strong workplace culture. • 49 percent are not satisfied with their direct supervisors. • 66 percent see no opportunities for professional growth. • 25 percent feel they do not have the tools to be successful in their jobs.

• 21 percent feel strongly valued at work, generally because of lack of appreciation and recognition.

• 42 percent know their organization’s vision, mission, and values.

Read those numbers again. Sobering, right? We’re talking about a serious workplace gap here.

Of the minority of companies that do measure culture and engagement, most do so via annual surveys. An annual survey? Really? That’s the best we’ve got, to check in on our greatest asset? By the time responses are collected, reviewed, and analyzed, there’s usually been a change in leadership, an updated product, or a shift in technology or market opportunity, rendering the data outdated and ultimately unhelpful.

To stay on top of our game, we must reinvent employee engagement for the digital age. We must better gather, evaluate, and analyze our data, and this must be done through something more than an annual employee survey.

Happily, though, the answers are already here. We just have to learn how to properly leverage them. Twenty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) asked people to put their documents online, and it completely revolutionized how we interact with the world around us. Where would we be without websites? Poring over encyclopedias and feebly attempt- ing to navigate a card catalogue? No thank you. We certainly have him to thank for making this book possible, not to mention our companies and liveli- hoods. Berners-Lee reflected on that transformation: “I said, ‘Could you put your documents on this Web thing?’ And you did. Thanks. It’s been a blast, hasn’t it?” (Berners-Lee, 2009). Yes, indeed, it has.

Now Berners-Lee is calling people to put their data on the Internet. He had an audience chant, “Raw data now!” after lecturing on how he believes that the more pieces of data we connect, the more powerful they become (Berners-Lee, 2009). Considering his history of incredible foresight, we dare- say he’s onto something. Society is finally learning to take informational data

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and place it within holistic data schemes. On a global scale, people are using data to address mass challenges like feeding people, supplying medical care, providing energy, and averting climate change. If data can do all that, they can certainly help us keep top talent engaged in our organizations.

Relative to other disciplines, however, HR has been notoriously lagging in the general push to leverage data and analytics. Although just about every other area of business has been able to gather and evaluate data as a way to diagnose problems, chart out strategies, and otherwise set an actionable cadence, the areas of people and culture have proven mulishly impermeable to robust data and analytics. Though our need was dire with much at stake, given the hefty consequences of flying blind, we have lagged behind in the realms of people and engagement.

To meet this need, and to do our best to resist and reverse the bum leg reputation with which we HR descendants have been saddled, we cre- ated the Emplify Score. We sought to develop a statistically sound tool that would enable us and any organization to objectively judge employee engage- ment. The resulting Emplify Score measure provides the necessary analytics to inform business leaders how they can affect their workplace culture and resulting employee engagement.

Adding this analytics dimension to your HR team is necessary and attainable, but we certainly don’t mean to say it is easy. Unfortunately, most HR employees have not had extensive, or often any, training in statistics, data science, or high-level math. Work to address that gap, by all means, but also do not hesitate to call in reinforcements. Properly leveraging data and analytics in HR could literally be made into a whole other book, and we do not presume to offer an adequate, comprehensive coverage of the topic in this chapter. That said, we will present a few tips and practices to garner an idea of what it entails and to demonstrate why it warrants additional consideration.

When you frame issues:

• Ask the right questions. Generally, we run into problems not with embracing the concept of analytics but with knowing how to focus it. Asking “How are we celebrating birthdays?” or “How many people signed up for our volunteer day?” will not create lasting impact. Instead, ask “How is top talent being engaged?” and “What if everyone were able to reach his or her full potential?” Measuring too many things (or too many of the wrong things) leads to watered down results. According to a 2015 survey, one of the least-measured HR metrics is “quality of hire,” which is only being measured by 28.5 percent of organizations (Bruce, 2015). Of those, more than half ask only one question: how satisfied the

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hiring manager is with the new recruit. Actionable? Not so much. Data are only as good as the questions you ask.

• Ask questions in the right way. Seek continuous feedback and mea- surement. With all the tools currently available, there is no reason you shouldn’t be continuously gathering data. If you wait until the end of a year to survey employees, you will probably get feedback on the previous month. Gauge in real-time, not in annual retro- spect. Along with this, cater to the ADD generation. If you ask more than five questions, people start to lose interest or stop responding authentically.

• Address the big picture. Instead of asking each department to provide three measurements to add to the scorecard, focus on the whole—the why, the root cause—and let those strategies cascade through everything else. Imagine a hierarchy: strategic impact on top, effective processes in the middle, and transactional efficiencies on the bottom. Draw an organizational map to see how the concepts and outcomes relate. Those ground-level tactics may be similar across different businesses, but the top level is unique to your organization.

• Think forward. The beauty of analytics is that it helps us chart our future course, not just record the past. One of the most popu- lar HR metrics is voluntary and involuntary turnover, measured by 78 percent of organizations (Bruce, 2015). But if you’re not recognizing valuable talent until it’s walking out the door, you’re missing the power of data. McKinsey tells of an organization that used predictive behavioral analytics to learn that most employees were leaving because of inadequate recognition and limited train- ing (Fecheyr-Lippins, et al., 2015). Unknowingly, management had beengivingexpensiveretentionbonusesthatwere“anineffectiveand costly Band-Aid.” The company redesigned training and recognition and consequently reduced its retention bonuses by $20 million and employee attrition by half. Be predictive, not reactive.

• Make it personal. There is no one-size-fits-all formula for data management. Walmart, Goldman Sachs, and Zappos might all measure turnover, but they’re using results to address different questions. One reason Google’s intensive people operations team has been immensely successful is because their strategy and tactics are so specific to Googlers (Bryant, 2011). They’ve learned that time off and exposure to senior leaders are more motivating rewards than cash or prizes. A study revealed that their people value

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even-keeled managers who make time for one-on-one check-ins and help their people solve problems. Using that information, they helped 75 percent of their least effective managers improve. Rather than try to replicate another company or adopt best practices, measure and understand what works for your organization.

When you whip out your calculators:

• Bring in the right minds. You need business people who address the right problems, statisticians who ensure there’s rigor in the methods, and technologists who make solutions scalable and transparent. Some data collections and analyzations are huge undertakings: Statisticians often gather thousands of observations across hundreds of variables. They may need to code nonnumerical information (feedback, interview notes) in order to synthesize results and look for patterns. There may be random correlations that look significant but are actually just noise. There may be correlations that shouldn’t be confused with causations. Make sure you have the right people on your team.

• Complement humans, but don’t replace them. In the euphoria of new analytics tools, it’s easy to think a few simple clicks will transform your business. But assumptions can be built into the metrics that are biased and discriminatory, or they could be measuring irrelevant or excessive information. We’re still at the outset of the big data revolution and are learning how to handle it best. These processes require strategy, critical thought, and creativity.

When you get the results:

• Make them visual. As data visionary Hans Rosling says, “Let the dataset change your mindset.” One of the best ways to do so is by visualizing the information. Design it so it makes more sense, tells a story, and lets patterns and connections emerge (Rosling, 2009). Sight is the fastest of our senses, with the same bandwidth as a computer network (McCandless, 2010). But of all the daily visuals and patterns pouring in, we’re only consciously aware of about 0.7 percent of what we see. Rosling helped create a free software, Gap- minder World, that offers and animates vast amounts of ready-made data. It’s an engrossing “fact tank” that exemplifies well the potential of data visualization. Google, ever the early adopter, started using this software in 2007 (Gapminder World Offline, 2013).

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• Make them actionable. Without some link to a future course of action, data overload is overwhelming and counterproductive. It’s tempting to throw around best practices and measure everything we can get our hands on. But we cannot realistically embrace 20 improved practices at once without ranking them by importance. Google figured out they could improve their onboarding process by 25 percent (a full month faster) by sending a simple reminder email to the hiring manager the Sunday before the new hire starts (Sullivan, 2015). The email highlights five quick bullets: Have a role and responsibilities discussion, match your new hire with a peer buddy, help your new hire build a social network, set up onboarding check-ins, and encourage open dialogue. That’s it. Their data show that employees work best under the assumption that they are smart and can figure things out. So, rather than dic- tating from on high, the company steers, reminds, and empowers the employees to take care of the rest.

Kenneth Cukier, Data Editor of The Economist, says, “Data doesn’t just let us see more of the same thing we were looking at. More data allows us to see new. It allows us to see better. It allows us to see different” (Cukier, 2014). Some call it “the new oil” (Rotella, 2012), others “the new soil” (McCandless, 2010), but whatever it is, it’s all around us, and it’s a fertile, creative medium. Take these steps to properly refine your data and use it to your advantage.

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34Chapter Set a Communication

Cadence (Or, Why Routine Is Anything

but Routine)

O ne of the easiest improvements you can make to your employee engagement strategy, as we’ve mentioned before, is better commu- nications. And we don’t only mean better in terms of the content

(though obviously that is critical). We also mean better in terms of timing and consistency. Todd believes so strongly in the importance of maintaining a communication drumbeat that he named his previous company Cadence Consulting.

Employees should be crystal clear on what to expect in your commu- nications. They should know how they will be communicated to, how often it will happen, through what channels, by whom, at what time, and about what information. They should also know where to go with questions and feedback.

Will communications take the form of a weekly stand-up touch-base? Perhaps a daily executive email? Does it involve a quarterly all-company meet- ing? Maybe a Google hangout, phone call, or series of enthusiastic texts? That’s entirely up to you and should be based on the channels your employees respond to best.

193Jaramillo, Santiago, and Todd Richardson. Agile Engagement : How to Drive Lasting Results by Cultivating a Flexible, Responsive, and Collaborative Culture, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/harrisburg-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4745628. Created from harrisburg-ebooks on 2020-11-11 04:39:02.

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Employees whose managers hold regular meetings with them are almost three times as likely to be engaged as those whose managers do not. These do not have to be excessive meetings (preferably not), they just need to be expected (Adkins & Harter, 2015).

As humans in a volatile world, we function rather well in structure. Sometimes, when it seems like a lot of things in our lives are up in the air, it’s really quite soothing to know we can rely on social structures like the train arriving, or the person standing in front of us at the grocery store to not insti- gate a mass food fight. We depend on countless structures, habits, and norms to tell us how to function in the world and to give us the ability to auto- mate our lives to an extent, which sounds a little despondent but is actually quite freeing.

Think how much free mental space you get by being able to let your mind wander while you navigate routines like restaurant waiting lists, bus stops, and checkout lines. The fact that we can come to expect certain specified structures in our lives allows us to dedicate our time and energy to areas that need it.

Such is true with communication. By knowing exactly what, when, where, and with whom you need to routinely communicate in the workplace, you no longer have to worry about concerns such as if your manager has forgotten about you, what is expected from you during a time of transition, why no one acknowledged the work you did, or what another team member is doing.

There’s quite a bit of conversation pushing for less routine in our lives, because it can help spark the creative juices. We get that. Sometimes we too appreciate walking a different route to the office, trying a new local hangout, traveling, or otherwise jostling our creative brains. However, in communica- tion, we do not want ambiguity. We want an expected, reliable cadence that frees up our mental faculties, focus, and productivity for the tasks at hand.

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35Chapter Allow for Autonomy

(Or, Why We All Need Some Space)

A s much as we like to flatter ourselves that every employee worksfor us because they’re so fond of the company and the leadership,we obviously know that is not the case. As we mentioned in the Preface, employees work for your organization for a host of unique reasons. They show up for a paycheck, for benefits, for engagement with coworkers, for interactions with their manager, or for the work they do. They show up for myriad reasons we could never presume to list or fully realize, and as leaders, we never know precisely which reason is going to keep each employee in their sweet spot.

Happily, though, we don’t have to know, and we certainly don’t have to dictate from on high.

We strongly suggest encouraging affinity groups, subcultures, and grass- roots initiatives. Name them what you will, but give individuals opportunities to spread their wings, plant their roots, and get involved in your organization through nonwork initiatives. Maybe it’s a philanthropic involvement in the community, maybe it’s a sustainability initiative in the organization, maybe it’s intramural kickball. All that matters is that your employees have one more thing keeping them engaged on a bad day.

In a word, subculture is community. It’s how people relate to each other. Top companies want employees to bring their complete selves to work, beyond a mere transactional, compensation-driven relationship. In return, workplaces need to engage employees’ complete selves.

195Jaramillo, Santiago, and Todd Richardson. Agile Engagement : How to Drive Lasting Results by Cultivating a Flexible, Responsive, and Collaborative Culture, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/harrisburg-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4745628. Created from harrisburg-ebooks on 2020-11-11 04:39:02.

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At ExactTarget, subcultures happened naturally and we applauded them. We nurtured them. It’s the subcultures that truly bind employees to a company and give them the opportunity to make an impact. In less than a decade, we grew from a private, 200-person, single-site operation to a public company with 3,000+ employees across 15+ global offices. Through that rapid growth, our Orange culture remained steadfast, so much so that after our acquisition, a group of former employees created an “Orange Crush” Facebook group to keep in touch with current and former employees. Within three days it had amassed 1,200 members and 1,800 photos, all shared by people on their own time, because they love or loved working for the company. People love this brand and what being part of the Orange culture means. It’s a legacy of relationships that lasts a lifetime (Lacy, 2015).

In a large company, you have to dig in and find your own interests, your own microcommunity. Thankfully, a good culture does not mean a homogenous one. From the finance department to minority groups, new parents to Tuesday night soccer games, bubbly to snarky and everything in between—they all can exemplify your culture. Even in their differences, there are always common threads: dedication to the customer, flexibility, no fear of failure. The goal of a strong culture is not to make everyone conform, but to pull them all together to work as a unified whole.

Next we share three things we learned about subcultures through our ExactTarget experience.

Subcultures Are Agile Incubators for Ideas

Early on at ExactTarget, a group of employees founded ExactImpact, a cross-functional team that owned community outreach and philanthropy. This amazing group of people volunteered their time and became an essential part of driving all of our community outreach, from blood drives to school supply collections, fundraiser runs to Christmas gifts for families. They used company resources but determined their own direction and grew our corporate philanthropy.

We would love to be the first to say that strong company culture has a powerful positive impact on the bottom line. But there is also a risk that strong culture imposes a level of stability on an organization that, after a few years, can sometimes even inhibit long-term performance by preventing innovation and adaption.

Subcultures, however, provide autonomy and agility within the overar- ching company. They can be containers of creativity to formulate ideas and accommodate market ups and downs. They’re havens and think tanks that

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enable employees to network, build communities, and stretch across walls and disconnects throughout the mass of large organizations. Ideas are freed to bubble up from the grassroots level, managers can enable without dictat- ing, and the larger organization can implement the sticky ideas. There’s no upper limit to that growth, because the subculture model can scale. It all comes down to hiring people you trust and nurturing groups within the broader culture.

Subcultures Are Grassroots

At ExactTarget, Todd was a sponsor for several employee groups, which mostly means that once a year he checked in with them to see if they needed anything. Otherwise, it was completely up to them. This hands-off approach is key. Groups will naturally form, and people will find their places. Resist the urge to direct them top-down. Some of the most influential leaders aren’t on official organizational charts, but the fluidity and effectiveness of day-to-day work depends on those informal networks.

Google also sets a great example of the grassroots approach. In 2007, they bought 100 Huffys for employees to more easily bop around the sprawl- ing campus (A Look at Google’s Massive Bicycle Subculture, 2013). These first bikes exploded into a vibrant cycling culture, largely free of top-down management. They now have seven mechanics on staff to keep up their 1,300 bikes. From this, more hardcore cyclists emerged to ride the 42-mile commute from San Francisco together, which then turned into longer routes all around the surrounding mountains. What started as a weird experiment stuck, so the company made sure the group had the resources to thrive—more bikes, a few bike mechanics—while allowing most of the growth, development, and recruitment to come from the people themselves.

We should mention that these groups oftentimes are not explicitly tied to company products at all, but still hugely tied to the mission, values, finan- cials, and development of the organization, because communities of people are the cartilage of the company. Ensure they’re aligned with the larger orga- nizational culture, then set them free.

Subcultures Bind People to the Organization

The bottom line is, people motivate each other, and it is your job to nur- ture that camaraderie. We encourage subcultures because those connections encourage our people.

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Our ExactFun group was another grassroots, cross-functional group all about promoting the culture and designing engaging events for everyone to get to know each other better. They provided incredible ways for people to interact with others from all areas and levels of the company. It was not uncommon to see executives playing basketball with all levels of employees at morning pick-up games or directors attending happy hours with summer interns. They even held annual talent shows where employees got to expe- rience their coworkers’ nonwork savvy. Through building relationships and making sure people could enjoy each other, they helped create the platform for us to work together most effectively.

Peers account for 70 percent of workplace fun, and camaraderie with others is the number one motivator for employees to go the extra mile at work (The 2014 Employee Engagement Organizational Culture Report, 2014). What’s more, recent research suggests that peers have significant impact on our stress levels and long-term well-being. Typically, we view stress in a neg- ative light. But as it turns out, changing how we think about stress actually changes how our bodies respond to it. Stress in and of itself is not actually so horrible. It’s our natural, necessary response to challenges, our bodies rising to the occasion, ready to weasel our ways out of sticky situations. Counterin- tuitive though it is, stress is only bad for us if we believe it’s bad for us.

Stanford health psychologist Kelly McGonigal found that stress also makes us more social, motivating us to both give and receive social support (McGonigal, 2013). In a longitudinal study of 1,000 U.S. adults, she found that for every major stressful life experience, such as financial difficulties or family crises, the risk of dying increased by 30 percent. But people who spent time caring for others showed absolutely zero stress-related increase in dying. Remarkably, caring created resilience.

That said, we cannot realistically feel connected to everyone. Cognitively, we’re not built to maintain more than about 150 meaningful rela- tionships. That’s why employee groups are an effective way to root and involve people within the bigger organization (Bennett, 2013). Organizational sub- cultures have a far greater influence on employee motivation than does organizational culture itself (Egan, 2008).

It all comes back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, or our Christmas card lists (one and the same, really). Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar studied our natural groupings and found the magic number of 150, which “seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, knowing who they are and how they relate to us. . . . It’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.” This Dunbar Number of 150 stays consistent throughout

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various cultures and time periods: parish registers, village populations, army companies, hunter-gatherer societies, and yes indeed, Christmas card lists (Bennett, 2013).

Case in Point: GORE-TEX

W. L. Gore & Associates co-founder Bill Gore realized his factories were becoming less efficient as they grew larger and employees no longer knew each other (Don’t Believe Facebook, You Only Have 150 Friends, 2011). Intuitively he grasped that you have to still know the people you’re working with and care about them enough that you want to work hard. So he capped the factories at 150 employees, even if it meant building another factory on the lot right next door. It has to do with transactive memory, or knowing what other people know. Though you may not know how to solve a problem, you know who does know how, and you know where to find that person in your building. CEO Terri Kelly credits this culture of autonomy and familiarity with her three-decade W. L. Gore & Associates career and rise to leadership:

I was fortunate to join GORE-TEX more than thirty years ago, when our strong cultural foundation was first established by founders Bill and Vieve Gore. They understood the importance of creating an empowered organization where creativity and entrepreneurship would thrive and every associate would feel empowered to make a difference and impact our collective success. These foundational values are still in place today, and all associates feel an incredible level of personal ownership and are shareholders of the company. The culture shaped my thinking early on in my career regarding the importance of creating a healthy work environment to achieve extraordinary outcomes.

Case in Point: Yoido Full Gospel Church

Churches have tapped into this idea of growing larger by getting smaller for years. The most successful megachurches are the most intentional about help- ing people belong in small groups. The largest church in the world, Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, South Korea, built its congregation of 830,000+ members on a massive web of “cells” (aka small groups) of 5 to 10 households each (“Yoido Full Gospel Church,” 2013). Since the first cells in the 1960s, whenever one grows to more than about 10 households, it splits in half and grows again. Senior Pastor Lee says the cells are the lifeblood of the church and that the “church is built around the cells, not cells around the church.”

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You can’t know everyone. But you can know your team, or your small group, and if you know them enough to care about them, that’s what separates the best organizations from the rest of them.

Although the number 150 gets all the fame, Dunbar actually coined a series of numbers, decreasing from 150 to 50, our close friends; then to 15, our confidants; and finally to our closest support group of 5 (Discreet Hierar- chical Organization of Social Group Sizes, 2005). On the flipside, our groups expand from 150 to 500, our acquaintances; and then to 1,500, our limit of people for whom we can put a name to a face. For GORE-TEX facto- ries, groups of 150 is the magic number. For Yoido church’s small groups, it’s 15 to 25 people, somewhere between close friends and confidants. Whatever the precise number may be for your type of work, the key is to cultivate small teams that can become the driving energy of your organization.

Subcultures are a natural occurrence in any organization. If you learn to nurture them, they can become some of the most essential pieces of your success.

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36Chapter Make It Personal

(Or, Why Nobody Leaves Their Personal Life at Home)

O f all the chapters in this book, we guarantee this tidbit of practical counsel will be most controversial. What you are about to read will be counter to everything your high-priced employment law

attorneys have taught you, namely, “Don’t get personal when you’re managing employees.” It will also fly in the face of most of what you have learned in business school as part of a traditional curriculum.

But we cannot speak at length about the importance of culture building and engagement without saying . . . you must get personal. Engagement is not sterile. It is not mundane. It is not one size fits all.

The corporate world isn’t the only place this principle comes into play. Quinn Buckner, NCAA champion, NBA champion, and Olympic gold medalist, says, “The hardest lesson I learned about motivating teams was the importance of understanding different motivations for different individuals” (Buckner, 2016).

It is high time we rethink our widespread aversion to getting personal. Long-term management success depends on caring for the whole employee, including his or her personal life. You will only unlock your full leadership potential, thoroughly engage employees, and achieve maximum business success if you get personal with your employees and care about both their professional and personal interests.

201Jaramillo, Santiago, and Todd Richardson. Agile Engagement : How to Drive Lasting Results by Cultivating a Flexible, Responsive, and Collaborative Culture, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/harrisburg-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4745628. Created from harrisburg-ebooks on 2020-11-11 04:39:02.

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Strong and effective relationships with employees, customers, and ven- dors drive business success. We forge strong and effective relationships when we find ways to build rapport and relate to each other through shared expe- riences, challenges, and perspectives. Obvious, right? Now as managers, why would we think for a second that we could focus strictly on the professional aspects of our employees instead of on cultivating an overall positive relation- ship? Clearly we should know whether an employee has the technical skills to complete a task or is operating as effectively and efficiently as expected. How- ever, focusing solely on the acute professional needs of an employee wholly discounts what fundamentally makes us all dynamic humans, namely, our unique lives beyond work. Building personal bonds is an often ignored part of the holistic manager-employee relationship.

“Ultimately, we all want to be part of something that matters,” says Yext’s Jeff Rohrs. “But we are more than simply the people we are at work. The best corporate cultures embrace both the professional and individual and make each stronger” (Rohrs, 2016).

Connect on a Deeper Level

We challenge you to identify instances where you truly connected with some- one over a strictly professional work topic. Have you forged a meaningful relationship with someone over a case you worked on, a pitch for a client, or a joint sale you made? The shared experience of any of those items may have provided some form of bond, but would you really consider it a connection that would lead to a long-term relationship? Probably not.

Now, consider instances where you have connected with someone on a park bench while watching your kids play, or while celebrating a friend’s birth- day, or while attending a philanthropic event. The connections made in these instances create natural relationships based on shared personal experiences.

A truly effective manager must create relationships with employees based on professional and personal traits. Only when the manager relates to the whole person can the employee’s full potential and loyalty be unlocked, ultimately enhancing overall business goals. Countless business books detail how to enhance employee productivity through a variety of managerial practices that focus on professional development. Although these pieces add immense value to the manager-employee relationship, they neglect the most important part of the relationship-building dynamic: the personal side of the equation. According to Nicole Bickett of Mainstreet, “You have to reach the most internal parts of people, you must reach them in their hearts. As a young leader, I thought it was more about what I knew and what I contributed.

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Make It Personal 203

Now I know that it is about how you connect with the core of people, find their true talents and skills and bring them out. You must find ways to create hope that the things we never dreamed would be possible are indeed within our reach when we work together. Train other leaders in your organization to do this and the results will follow” (Bickett, 2016).

Employment law attorneys will commonly tell you not to engage employees around personal issues. They will counsel you to avoid discussions around personal struggles, physical or mental challenges, family matters, and other similar topics. And then they’ll top it off with a cheery admonition that the less you know or are engaged with an employee on a personal front, the less risk you run of triggering an employment law claim. For example, if your employee shares with you that he or she is suffering from a medical condition and you subsequently separate that employee, he or she could sue you by claiming disability discrimination. If you never knew about the medical condition, you would have a much stronger defense. For this reason, attorneys typically preach that ignorance is bliss, and managers should remain as disconnected from employees’ personal matters as possible.

Among these personal matters, typical attorneys would tell you to steer clear of childhood experiences, family background and makeup, outside activ- ities and interests, religious preferences, marital and parenting challenges and accomplishments, and health issues. We tell you instead to embrace these top- ics as necessary pieces of a blurry, blended personal/professional world.

Rhett Trees, Partner at Caddis Capital, is a prime example of caring for the whole person:

Every morning, before I leave for work, I find a few min- utes of silence to meditate and sit with my personal mission statement, “to change someone’s soul today.”

It sounds nearly impossible to do, but this short phrase has taught me more about business, spirituality, friendship and, most important, the foundation for a successful life. When I speak to business leaders, college students and bud- ding entrepreneurs the first question they ask is, “What is your secret sauce?” My consistent answer focuses on one overarching trait: be vulnerable.

In nearly every business meeting, regardless if it is our first or 400th, I’ll reference either my spirituality or my mis- sion statement with the only intention of digging deeper

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204 AGILE ENGAGEMENT

into the soul of a fellow passenger on this journey called life. Oftentimes, if not always, the unintended benefit is the fact that my soul is the one that “changes” based on the conver- sation that follows.

Recently, I was originally introduced to this investor through a mutual friend, and I shared my spiritual jour- ney with him during our first meeting. I wasn’t confident that he would engage based on his reputation. However, this vulnerability led to the fact that we were both “recov- ering a--holes,” seeking the answer to “Why are we here?” and struggling to be “everything to everyone.”

My gut tells me that we would have been mired in pleasantries if not for the fleeting introduction of vulnera- bility into our initial conversation. Fast-forward to a later breakfast meeting, and it was like reconnecting with a spiri- tual guru or old friend after many years. We quickly caught up on business, but were both eager to dive deep into top- ics like our respective wives, kids, integrity moments, family members who are preparing or have passed to the other side, how our passions fulfill our soul, and the fact that “thoughts become things.”

I know deep in my heart that vulnerability is the only reason this conversation occurred. There is no other founda- tion for this type of transparency, especially between busi- nesspeople. Like anything, this concept might be outside of most people’s comfort zones and feel off-limits at first. But try it and you just might change someone’s soul today (Trees, 2016).

Care for the Whole Employee

Enduring relationships form when we start caring for the whole employee. Sometimes this runs counter to our short-term business objectives and may even result in a short-term “loss.” But in the long haul, we want a loyal and engaged workforce, and we need that workforce in order to achieve our long-term business objectives. Nothing elicits that kind of long-term engage- ment and loyalty more than rooting deep personal connections.

Blair West of Cummins Inc. promotes this holistic approach in her role as director of corporate communications and functional excellence.

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Make It Personal 205

“Companies must offer resources and ways to care for an employee’s whole self in a way that sets him or her up for success both personally and professionally. This may include recognition that, in addition to meeting the employee’s financial needs, the company drives personal well-being, dependent care options, support and flexibility to care for family members or maintain outside-of-work commitments, access to healthy meal options and other healthy lifestyle choices, concierge services, and anything else that allows an employee to focus on being productive and effective while at the workplace” (Blair West, 2016).

Ellen Humphrey of Appirio thinks of it this way: “Our lives and work are more connected than ever. I don’t want my team members to check their personalities at the door, nor do I want to check mine” (Humphrey, 2016).

One caveat: Bear in mind that general business principles (e.g., cost-benefit analyses) still govern how much attention should be provided to any particular employee. We have all had the employee who perpetuates a constant swirl of non-value-added drama, or the employee who cannot and does not want to be helped, or the employee who requires so much help that you would have to neglect other people and responsibilities in order to invest in him or her. We’re not saying the balance is obvious or easy; we’re saying use your judgment and treat people like the full humans they are.

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37Chapter Earn Trust

(Or, Why Trust Is the Foundation of Everything Else)

W e talk a lot about culture, which we can work to shape andinvolve everyone in. But at its core, much of culture comes downto how people interact. As a leader, what do you know about your employees, and what do they know about you? How well do you know them? How do your coworkers think? How do they communicate? What motivates them? Do they see you as warm and engaging? Do they see you as competent? Do they trust you? Ultimately, what kind of culture are you creating with your people?

Intuitions Come First; Reasoning Comes Second

Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt (2012) has found that humans are far less rational than we are rationalizing. In other words, we are primarily intuitive creatures whose gut feelings drive our strategic reasoning. We have automatic, instant reactions to things, and then we reason to defend those reactions.

207Jaramillo, Santiago, and Todd Richardson. Agile Engagement : How to Drive Lasting Results by Cultivating a Flexible, Responsive, and Collaborative Culture, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/harrisburg-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4745628. Created from harrisburg-ebooks on 2020-11-11 04:39:02.

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208 AGILE ENGAGEMENT

We are often led to believe that reason is the highest of our faculties, but in actuality our unconscious mind does most of our thinking. Remember those millions of pieces of information flying at us every minute, of which our human brains are consciously aware of a measly 60? Our unconscious processes—emotions, intuitions, sentiments, gut feelings—are at the center of our thinking, handling the millions-minus-60 things to think about (Martin, 2009). They are the foundation of our reason because they tell us what to value.

Before people decide what they think of your message, they decide what they think of you. Trust and cooperation are not instructions; they’re feelings.

Just ask Clay Robinson of Sun King Brewing. He says, “Authenticity is the key. Be true to yourself and communicate openly and honestly with your team. They will respond in remarkable ways” (Robinson, 2016).

What Happens Between Two Brains When They Interact

When we interact with people, our brains make snap judgments about them. Harvard Business School psychologist Amy Cuddy has found that we pri- marily gauge two characteristics: how lovable they are (warmth, communion, trustworthiness) and how fearsome they are (competence, strength, agency). With these two dimensions of social judgment, we answer two critical ques- tions: “What are this person’s intentions toward me?” and “Is he or she capable of acting on those intentions?”

If someone is competent but not warm, that elicits respect and resentment—we want to cooperate or affiliate ourselves with that person, but we also feel vulnerable to them. If someone is warm but not competent, that elicits pity and lack of respect—we help people we pity, but when it becomes difficult or inconvenient, we ultimately neglect them.

In business, this means that, more than your background, your message, or your ideas, how you interact with people matters—a lot.

Are You Warm or Are You Competent?

Ideally, of course, the answer is both—but in moderation, like a well-balanced social judgment diet. Interestingly, though, our brains process warmth before competence. The first thing we look for in others is evidence of trustwor- thiness, based on their warmth. But when we present ourselves to others, we

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Earn Trust 209

often mistakenly try to show our competence first, establishing strength before trust. We want to tackle challenges, work the longest hours, present innova- tive ideas in meetings. But it seems that warmth, at least right off the bat, matters much more than strength. In a study of 51,836 leaders, only 27 were rated in both the bottom quartile of likability and in the top quartile of over- all leadership effectiveness. In other words, the chances that a manager who is strongly disliked will still be considered a good leader are about 1 in 2,000.

As a leader, you have to show warmth. Competence is assumed— warmth is what makes the difference. Strength, without a foundation of trust, elicits fear. Fear undermines cognitive potential, creativity, and problem solving and causes employees to disengage. In short, people will obey, but they will not follow, engage, take ownership, or help others. Warmth, on the other hand, facilitates trust and influence. Trust increases information sharing, collaboration, and creativity. When we trust people, we naturally combine talents and strengths and work tirelessly to seize opportunities. How can you show warmth? By knowing and caring about your employees.

So in sum, our unconscious intuition, rather than reason, drives most of our thinking, we judge people based on their warmth and competence, and for leaders, warmth is often more overlooked but also more critical than competence. All this to say, neurological evidence shows that knowing and caring about your employees makes a difference for the bottom line.

How Do We Get People to Trust and Collaborate with Us?

• Listen. In his book How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie writes, “You can make more friends in two months by being interested in other people than in two years by trying to get other people interested in you,” (Carnegie, 2006). Listen to what people say, and seek to understand what they need. Know what makes your employees unique. Show interest in their lives and remember details about what they tell you.

• Ask. After listening, ask more questions. Maybe start with, “What would you like from me?” or “What can I do to improve your expe- rience?” or “How is your life outside of work?” Be invested in your employees as people, too, beyond work responsibilities. Care for the whole person.

• Engage. Be warm. Level with people. Try lowering the pitch and vol- ume of your voice, as if comforting a friend. Throw in the occasional personal story. Validate feelings and worldviews. Smile and mean it.

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Smiling is evolutionarily contagious, because it triggers mirror neu- rons in others and suppresses the control we usually have on our facial muscles.

• Communicate. In many cases, the effectiveness of a group is not determined by the IQ of the group but by how well they commu- nicate. Some form of daily communication is ideal—phone, email, face to face, or a combination of those forms. And if someone asks a question you can’t answer? “Be truthful, even when the truth is ‘I don’t know,’ says Ellen Humphrey of Appirio (Ellen Humphrey, 2016).

• Support. Make workers feel safe and comfortable talking about anything—safe to experiment, challenge, share information, fail, and help each other. Management consultant Margaret Heffernan advocates that organizations need to develop enough trust that employees can safely disagree. We need thinking partners who aren’t echo chambers, and to get this kind of candid conflict, we need high levels of trust and support. She has found in surveys that 85 percent of European and American executives acknowledge they have issues or concerns at work that they are afraid to raise because of conflict (Heffernan, 2015). Which means these organizations are not thinking together effectively. Which means that the leaders who run these organizations, who go out of their way to find the very best people they can, mostly fail to get the very best out of them. Show your employees that you support them as people—this is the core of a culture of trust.

How you engage people, what you know about them, and what they know about you have a profound impact on your workplace. Not simply because being nice to people is what your mother taught you, but because our brains actually unconsciously pick up on things like kindness, warmth, care, and engagement, and they affect tangible outcomes like performance, retention, creativity, and collaboration. So the next time you go to interact with someone at work, make sure you think twice about what kind of culture you want to create. How you treat people matters and directly affects both culture and employee engagement.

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38Chapter Expel Poor Culture Fits (Or, Why One Bad Apple Spoils

the Bunch)

Y ou know the drill: Everyone on the team gets along swimmingly,and then one scoundrel comes in with manipulation, malice, harshwords, laziness, or otherwise divisive behaviors. Try as they valiantly might, the group just cannot seem to overrule that one person’s insidious- ness. It’s exhausting, it’s demoralizing, it’s counterproductive, and frankly, it’s the worst.

In their research paper “How, When, and Why Bad Apples Spoil the Barrel: Negative Group Members and Dysfunctional Groups,” Felps, Mitchell, and Byington (182–183) classify “bad apples” into three categories:

• Withholders of effort, who “intentionally dodge their responsibili- ties to the group and freeride off the efforts of others”

• The affectively negative, who “continually express a negative mood, emotion, or attitude”

• Interpersonal deviants, who “detract from the group’s contextual environment by violating interpersonal norms of respect”

211Jaramillo, Santiago, and Todd Richardson. Agile Engagement : How to Drive Lasting Results by Cultivating a Flexible, Responsive, and Collaborative Culture, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/harrisburg-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4745628. Created from harrisburg-ebooks on 2020-11-11 04:39:02.

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212 AGILE ENGAGEMENT

All less than desirable coworkers, to be sure. These negative group mem- bers can impede everything from cooperation to motivated effort, coordina- tion to creativity, learning and helpful conflicts and everything in between, “eventually resulting in poor group performance, lower well-being, and possibly team collapse.” What’s more, the researchers report that one single negative employee can cause a 30 to 40 percent drop in overall team performance (Felps, Mitchell, & Byington, 178).

And so, as remaining conscientious group members who seek to improve such an aversive experience, we generally react in one of three ways (Felps, Mitchell, & Byington, 185):

• Motivational intervention. We try to change the negative person’s behavior.

• Rejection. We remove the negative person. • Defensiveness. We protect our own selves.

Both the motivational intervention and rejection options are fairly con- structive and typically prevent said bad apples from ever spoiling the whole barrel. Defensiveness, however, often gets a little more ugly, manifesting in episodes of “lashing out, revenge, unrealistic appraisals, distraction, various attempts at mood maintenance, and withdrawal.”

The good news is, researchers report that the two key factors that pro- mote defensiveness are lack of power and the basic psychological tendency to react strongly to negative behavior, both of which are fundamentally matters of culture, in the people you choose to hire and in how serious you are about letting the deviants go (Felps, Mitchell, & Byington, 188–189).

Hiring and leveraging the right people fuels your culture. At its core, a company is the sum of its people and personalities. In other words, if you hire a bunch of assholes, it is unlikely that lumping them all together will rectify anything. Au contraire, hiring even one asshole can wreak havoc—see the earlier statistic on the alarming 30 to 40 percent drop in team performance.

Likewise, expelling poor fits quickly ensures your culture does not go off the tracks. Too many organizations justify corrosive behavior with extraor- dinary talent. For employees who have experience, tenure, or power, they employ an unspoken standard of “the more you win, the more of an ass we’ll let you be.” With pressures like sales goals and product development on the line, this may seem to be a viable method in the short term (it’s still not), but over the long haul it will erode any semblance of employee loyalty you hope to

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Expel Poor Culture Fits 213

have. Team members need to be able to trust the consistency and judgement of their leadership.

Brad Morehead of LiveWatch Security says:

Every hire affects the company’s culture for better or worse. Good hires almost instantly have a positive impact on the culture. They have a multiplier effect on those around them and those whom they lead. Bad hires do the opposite. Culturally bad hires cause internal discord, erode trust, and create inefficiency. When some- one is not working out because he or she lacks the proper knowl- edge, work ethic or ability, that’s one thing. It’s bad, but it usually only affects one team. When people aren’t working because they aren’t a culture fit, they quickly become caustic and create neg- ative repercussions for everyone around them. You have to get rid of them immediately. In the end, it’s better for those peo- ple too, as they may be good employees at a company with a different culture.

Hiring Tips • Leverage a tool like the Predictive Index (“Predictive Index”) to get a deeper view of a candidate or an employee.

• Take the time to better understand what makes people tick. Consider bringing candidates in for a full day or two, giving them small projects to accomplish alone and with a team, and observing them interacting with others.

• Hire slow, fire fast. Don’t let cultural misfits taint others, and don’t be afraid to cite cultural disconnects as the reason for a breakup.

• Use orientation not just as a way to describe your culture, but to help facilitate a discussion around specifics of how the new employee will enhance the culture.

• Draw attention to cultural fit as a contributing reason for promotions.

• Create multiple opportunities to highlight cultural accomplish- ments.

• Recognize cultural all-stars on a regular basis, such as with culture awards for those that go above and beyond.

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214 AGILE ENGAGEMENT

Worth the Effort

Hire for culture with the same level of rigor that you hire for aptitude. Yes, pay attention to mental faculties, work experience, and so on, but similarly count interpersonal skills, presence, and cultural fit.

Mobi co-founder and CEO Scott Kraege thinks of it this way:

When molding a company culture, corrosive employees are one of the most damaging factors. If a new employee does not fit the culture of the company, he or she will either become extremely unhappy or will try to mold her new environment to their own values. While these employees can fit and work, they will not fully contribute if they are not there for the right reasons. Corrosive employees should be seen as such, and an organization should not hesitate to part ways with someone who works against the com- pany culture, even if he or she possesses a high level of skill.

Be specific in detailing what that means at your company, in order to help potential employees self-select. It’s a little extra time, but it’s not rocket science, and it’s well worth it.

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39Chapter Communicate with

Employees (Or, Why Mobile Apps Simplify

Everything)

Employees, more times than not, don’t want to be communicated withvia email anymore. Their inboxes are already bursting at the virtualseams. Employees, more times than not, would prefer clear, concise, and maybe even witty or aesthetically pleasing messages. They would prefer to be reached at an opportune moment and not besieged in the middle of their creative maker hours. They would prefer a clear path through which they can direct questions and find more information. Is this so much to ask? We sure hope not.

Simplification Is Key

Simplification is dire and overdue. We are moving from “doing more with less” to “doing less better.” Employees today have not one iota of care for any technology that does not materially make their lives better. Whole industries have been rocked by innovations that simplify the way we live, and the workplace is next in line. Peter Drucker wrote that “much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work,”

215Jaramillo, Santiago, and Todd Richardson. Agile Engagement : How to Drive Lasting Results by Cultivating a Flexible, Responsive, and Collaborative Culture, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/harrisburg-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4745628. Created from harrisburg-ebooks on 2020-11-11 04:39:02.

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216 AGILE ENGAGEMENT

(Drucker, 2006). HR should aim instead to be a catalyst for the entire orga- nization to declutter. Simplify communications, disentangle processes, and consolidate information. Treat time capital with the same gravity you allot financial capital, and start by simplifying complexity through integrated tech- nology. Instead of working more, we need a better, faster, more effective way of working.

At Emplify, we saw these needs of employees wanting and needing to be communicated with differently, and we overcame these challenges by doing what we do best—mobile apps.

We stumbled into the solution almost by accident. We initially designed it simply to address our own internal needs. In the midst of rapid growth, we needed a one-stop source for all things company related. As mobile app mak- ers, what better way than by creating our own internal app platform? So we built the app, threw a launch party, and within a few months it became a wild success. We saw a 100 percent download rate, increased participation in events, and a record number of submissions for our recognition program (Jaramillo, 2015). It works because it’s a central, mobile place where employ- ees can access useful information. It’s a focused, purpose-built tool for our internal communications team. It’s a way to gather feedback, promote recog- nition, boost productivity, increase alignment, and centralize resources. It’s a beautiful product that fits seamlessly with the reality of users’ lives who, in this case, are our own employees. Santiago was featured in Forbes, saying “Our purpose as a company is to help organizations thrive by helping them communicate and engage with their audiences. Our most important audience for us to reach is our own internal people” (Burg, 2015).

We believe this solution meets head-on the common pitfalls to culture and engagement. Here’s why it works:

• It meets people where they are. The lines between professional and personal are already blurred, and between the rise of online platforms, freelance work, and an on-demand economy, mobile apps just make sense. The top two reasons consumers download mobile apps are convenience and speedy access to information (2014 Mobile Behavior Report, 23). The readiness is already there; we are meeting people where they are. People’s phones are already an extension of their arms, and an app is a great way to reach them in the way they’re already consuming information. Plus, unlike the ultimate democracy of email, an app affords employees the choice of when to access work information and when to not. It will become the hub that merges together all work-related channels of information, just one finger tap away.

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Communicate with Employees 217

• Outdated HR system, meet smartphone. We are seeing a radically disruptive shift in HR from “systems of record” to “systems of engagement.” It’s a repurposing of software, from back-office data automation to self-service platforms, and from static, one-way com- munications toward a real-time dialogue of engagement. HR is going mobile, and it’s working. Employees are two to five times more likely (Bersin, 2014) to access HR applications on their smartphones than their PCs, and they find them 60 percent more engaging (Mobile Apps Infographic, 2014). It’s the consumerization of cor- porate systems, which essentially means treating employees like we treat customers (Hodson et al., 2014). Mobile, with its one-click, one-swipe ease, will become HR’s primary interface.

• Separation → Integration. As knowledge workers, we do not innately separate work and life in our minds. Our old social constructs did that for us, because industrial life was pretty distinct from family life. But now we think about all of it all the time. You’re one person, with one brain, and if you’re stressed about work you will probably be stressed at dinner too. Work and life are very much intermingled. It’s not about keeping them separate; it’s about keeping ourselves feeling like we’re in control. Which comes down to good design, and there’s an app for that.

• Longer sessions → shorter, more frequent intervals: the snackification of life. We seek real-time collaboration, immediate feedback, and quick turnarounds. We juggle multiple work items interspersed with a steady stream of checking our email. We work throughout the day—at home, in the office, and everywhere in between.

• It’s miles ahead of your current social chatter service. Only 13 percent of employees participate in their company’s social intranet daily, and 31 percent rarely or never do (How a Mobile First Strategy Can Increase Employment Engagement, 2014, 8). We’re talking here about real engagement, material improvements intermingled in their daily work, enabling them to do their jobs better. HR is seeing a major shift from static, one-way communications toward a real-time, mobile dialogue of engagement.

• It markets to employees how you market to customers. ExactTarget wrote in their 2014 Mobile Behavior Report, “The brand with the easiest-to-access content wins. Eighty-three percent of consumers said that a seamless experience across all their devices is somewhat or very important. They want the content they want where and when they want it” (2014 Mobile Behavior Report). We so easily

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digest this as marketers. Why does it not come as intuitively that we should do the same for our employees? Employees expect the same technologies at work that they have as consumers. It’s not just the content that matters; it’s how you present it.

Bottom line: Communicate with your employees in the same manner and with the same level of intent that you would use to communicate to your customers. That does not mean you need to become paralyzed with complexity. Make the most of cutting-edge technology, and keep it simple.

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